


Your Mirror

by equestrianstatue



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Friends With Benefits, Hereditary Enemies With Benefits, M/M, Mutual Idiocy, Mutual Miscommunication, Mutual Pining, The "Arrangement", The Arrangement, non-chronological storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-29
Updated: 2020-01-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 17:35:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 28,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22467220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/equestrianstatue/pseuds/equestrianstatue
Summary: I'll be your mirror; reflect what you are, in case you don't know.Crowley drummed his fingers briefly against his mug, and then sat back a little in his chair. He gave Aziraphale a long, appraising glance, and then seemed to come to some decision. “Listen, angel,” he said, “let me pitch you something.”Lulled by the familiar patter of Crowley’s voice as he was, Aziraphale still recognised this to be vaguely dangerous territory. He swallowed. “Go on,” he said.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 236
Kudos: 687
Collections: Good Omens (Complete works), Good Omens Big Bang 2019, Ixnael’s Recommendations, Our Own Side





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic couldn’t have been written without the infinite generosity, insight and enthusiasm of Mapes and Laura Shapiro, both of whom kept me from losing my mind; the relentlessly feral energy of several people on Discord; and my on-call historical consultant, ailcia, who burnt a pizza while urgently telling me facts about Hadrian’s Wall.
> 
> The absolutely beautiful art is by domduongart (here on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/domduongart) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/domduongart/)), who somehow captured the exact spirit of this story while I was still trying to get the hang of it myself.
> 
> NB: There are various forms and combinations of efforts in this story, and male pronouns throughout.

**The present day, Soho**

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” said Crowley.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Said,” came Crowley’s voice, “that I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

Aziraphale was happily re-shelving a beautiful 18th-century set of the _Anabasis of Alexander_ — which he had managed to prevent an alarmingly interested customer from examining too closely earlier that afternoon— and mentally conducting the Vivaldi concerto emerging cheerfully from the gramophone. It was only as he slid the final volume of the book into place that he really managed to parse this statement. He frowned.

“’Dear boy’?” repeated Aziraphale. “But I call everyone that. Well, apart from women.”

“I know you do,” said Crowley, from somewhere on the other side of the shelf. “Not a boy, anyway, am I?”

“Of course not. But it’s just an expression. A human expression.” Aziraphale paused. “You’ve never minded before.”

“Never said I minded before, you mean.”

Aziraphale, dusting his hands on the front of his waistcoat, made his way back into the centre of the shop. Crowley was perched on the arm of Aziraphale’s sofa, his legs bent up in front of him in a slightly improbable manner that meant he could rest his folded arms on his knees, and his chin on top of those. He looked rather as if someone had parcelled him up with string for ease of postage.

“Yes, I suppose I do,” said Aziraphale, rather baffled.

Aziraphale wasn’t sure what he had thought the first week of the rest of their lives would be like; during the recent onslaught of apocalyptic events, he hadn’t quite had the time to imagine that he and Crowley would be around to see it. In actuality, the past few days had been fairly quiet. Not really knowing what else to do, and supposing it had been a significant factor in his desire to prevent the world from destruction, Aziraphale had spent most of the week in his bookshop. He had even gone so far as to open it to the public for as many as four and a half days out of seven. And Crowley, who had fallen asleep on the sofa a few whiskies after their celebratory meal at the Ritz, had drifted in and out of it, but mostly in.

Aziraphale was perfectly content to have him around. He appreciated the company. And at some point, he supposed, they should really have a think about what their Great Purposes on Earth were to be, now that these were no longer the propagation or prevention of the Apocalypse. But he had, for some reason, been putting this conversation off.

Crowley had seemed a little moody over the last few days, but this wasn’t particularly unusual behaviour. He was, after all, a demon, and he was also, as he had pointed out before that first evening’s nap, very tired. But the way he looked now, with his body spiked up at the far edge of the sofa, combined with the flop of his hair and the odd little downward turn of his mouth, was a strange kind of sight. It made Aziraphale uneasy.

“Would you prefer it if I called you… something else?” Aziraphale asked.

“Not really,” said Crowley. “Name’s fine, don’t you think?”

“If you like.”

Crowley had never seemed to begrudge Aziraphale the small, fleeting intimacies that came with certain forms of address. _Your most humble servant_ , which had amused them both, when they had been in the habit of exchanging letters. _Cuz_ , for a short while around the end of the sixteenth century, as a sort of joke. _Dear boy_ had actually inveigled its way into Aziraphale’s vocabulary somewhere in the vicinity of the 1880s, quite independently of Crowley, and by the time they were next in regular contact, it had already stuck. They were not even, really, intimacies; just small, unobtrusive recognitions of a level of confidence between them. A shortcut in their vocabularies. Towards friendship, Aziraphale supposed.

Aziraphale had wondered, once or twice over the past few days, whether Crowley was beginning to regret his annexation from Hell. For all his professed antipathy towards the place, the reality of being stuck permanently above ground with only an angel for company could be catching up with him. But then again, this really hadn’t seemed like something he was trying to avoid. _We could go off together. I lost my best friend._ Twice, Aziraphale’s stunned, startled heart had caught in his throat.

“I don’t mean anything by it,” Aziraphale said, trying to sound light and unconcerned. “You know that, don’t you?”

Crowley stared at him for a moment or two, or at least Aziraphale assumed he was, from behind the glasses. “Yeah, I know,” he said. Then he dropped his chin, rolled himself off the arm of the sofa and into a standing position. “Got anything to drink?” He began to slouch in the direction of the bookshop’s back room. “Rhetorical question. I know you do.”

Aziraphale opened and closed his mouth as he watched him go, feeling obscurely defeated. And then, suddenly rather tired of this particular brand of defeat, he said, “Listen here, Crowley, I don’t understand why you’ve taken to being so… obtuse.”

Crowley turned back to face him. “Obtuse,” he repeated, consideringly. “Yes. Of the two of us, I’m certainly the obtuse one.”

“Yes, you are. You have been recently, anyway.”

Crowley paused, folded his arms, and looked Aziraphale up and down. “I think on the whole I’ve been crystal clear, actually. Open book. Open _library_. Public access. You, on the other hand…”

“ _Me_?”

“Whenever I think I’ve got a read on you, angel…” Crowley shrugged, and shook his head. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”

“Crowley, what is this about? Do you— ” Aziraphale had been avoiding broaching this question, because he quite rightly thought that if he said it aloud, it was going to sound ridiculous. “Do you… miss Hell?”

“No,” said Crowley, incredulously. “I do not _miss Hell_. The fact that you can even ask me that is exactly what I’m talking about, if you want obtuse.”

“What _are_ you talking about, then?”

“I thought,” said Crowley, or sort of growled it, but in the way that he growled things he didn’t want to say. “I _thought_ that we were on the same page. Goal-wise. Over the last week. Over the last eleven years, actually.”

“We have been. We were. Of course we were.”

“Then why did you lie to me?”

Aziraphale screwed up his nose. “Lie to you? When?”

“Literally days ago,” said Crowley, looking somehow both affronted and astonished. “You found out where the Antichrist was, and you didn’t tell me. You told them.” He nodded towards the skylight above their heads, where iron-grey clouds were gathering, and on which rain was beginning to patter.

“That wasn’t a _lie_.”

“Might as well have been.”

“But I was,” said Aziraphale, feeling his face heat in a horrible mixture of frustration and— _not_ guilt, because he was right about this, there _wasn’t_ anything to feel guilty about— “I was still trying to do what we had agreed. To stop it all from happening. I simply thought the best way to to that was to let upstairs sort it out.”

“Then you were a fool,” said Crowley.

Aziraphale breathed in, taken aback by the open flare of anger. This was far from the pretended, theatrical sword-clashing he and Crowley still engaged in now and again for show, and neither was it the low-level trading of barbs that surfaced when they were spending too much time together and starting to rub each other up the wrong way. No, Crowley meant this, and he had also meant it to hurt, which was essentially unheard of. And hurt it did, a sharp red bloom of pain in Aziraphale’s heart.

“I’m sorry,” Crowley said, before Aziraphale had even begun to form a reply. His head dropped an inch, looking unhappily at his shoes, but then, almost at once, he looked up again. “No, actually, I’m not. I warned you, you know, over and over again. I kept telling you not to trust them, and you ignored me, and you went to them. And I didn’t— ” Crowley seemed to catch hold of his own words. He paused, and swallowed, and hardened his expression. “And I actually didn’t think you would do that. I thought we really were on the same side. Which shows what I know.”

“But you’d do the same,” said Aziraphale, rather desperately. “Well, not in _this_ case, obviously, since the Antichrist was specifically your side’s whole _project_ , but, in another situation, there’s all sorts of intelligence you might take downstairs. That’s the Arrangement, isn’t it? We’ve always stayed broadly…” he groped awkwardly for the word. “Loyal. To our respective sides. When we had them, at least.”

Crowley shook his head. “Come on, Aziraphale. I’ve been putting you— _us_ — before my lot for centuries. Longer. You know that.”

“But I’m an angel. I couldn’t have. You know _that_ , you’ve always known that. So it’s all very well for you to get to be selfish about it, but— ”

“Selfish,” Crowley interrupted. He looked utterly blank. Uncomprehending. If the idea wasn’t patently ridiculous, he might have looked hurt.

“Look, dear boy, I’m only trying to compliment you on your own terms.”

“What did I _just_ ask you?” Crowley snarled. “Don’t call me that.”

“All right!” Aziraphale held up his hands, helpless, adrift in unfathomable waters. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

Crowley dropped his hands to his sides. His anger seemed to fall away as quickly as it had risen to the surface, leaving him oddly miserable. “If you think _I’ve_ been selfish,” he said, “then I’m not sure what to say. I’ve never questioned a single one of your rules, all the systems you’ve insisted on putting in place around us, I’ve…”

“Yes, you have,” said Aziraphale, now his turn to be incredulous. “You’ve questioned all of them. Repeatedly.”

“Well, yes, all right, maybe. But that’s what I’m here for, isn’t it? That’s what I do. Ask the questions you don’t want to ask. That’s what you keep me around for. Someone to do the dirty work. Mentally speaking.”

“No,” said Aziraphale. “That’s not why I _keep you around_. I wasn’t aware I’d been keeping you around at all. I thought that we were simply… being around each other.”

“Did you,” said Crowley. His voice was rather heavy. “Yes. Of course. All right then.”

They looked at one another other from opposite sides of the carpet. Aziraphale’s hands twitched uncomfortably by his sides, and Crowley still seemed folded in on himself, taking up somehow less space than usual. Aziraphale felt that the conversation was slipping away from him before he had even begun to get his head round it. On the skylight the rain was now falling in earnest, an incessant little drumbeat against the rising of strings from the gramophone.

“Why would you think otherwise?” Aziraphale said, frowning.

Crowley shifted his jaw, slowly, the rest of his body unmoving. After a moment he said, “When I suggested we could just forget the whole thing. Leave the Earth behind. Go somewhere else. Why wouldn’t you come?”

“I,” said Aziraphale, surprised. “How could I have done? It wasn’t a _helpful_ suggestion, Crowley. It wasn’t actually a solution to anything. You didn’t mean it. You just meant that it was all over. That you were out of ideas.”

Crowley rubbed his hand unhappily over his chin. “You know I meant it,” he said, quietly.

“Don’t say things like that,” said Aziraphale. He was the one who was annoyed, now, an unhappy, panicky sort of frustration rising in his chest. “Don’t say things you think I want to hear.”

“Oh,” said Crowley, “I think you’ve made it abundantly clear what you don’t want to hear.”

**1994, Lewes**

Aziraphale had been trying, after a slightly embarrassing run-in with Gabriel on the matter, to stop smoking. Not because it was bad for him: in fact, he had to concentrate very hard indeed if he wanted to retain the authentic human experience of getting a bit of carbon monoxide into the lungs, since his corporation kept transfiguring the smoke into an entirely harmless, lightly sweet-flavoured vapour as it was ingested.

It was, he conceded, probably setting a bad example to humankind; but in the grand scheme of things, and bearing in mind that one relatively reclusive bookseller kicking the habit was unlikely to have much of a ripple effect, this didn’t feel like a very compelling argument either. Gabriel’s distaste had been more along the lines of Aziraphale having picked up an unpleasant, backwater habit from the grubby fingers of humanity, who, unlike Aziraphale, couldn’t be expected to know any better. But in actuality, the real reason that Aziraphale thought he ought to stop smoking was because he had inevitably picked it up somewhere over the last couple of centuries from Crowley, who did it because he thought, not without reason, that it suited his aesthetic. Aziraphale just found it useful to have something to do with his hands.

Aziraphale hadn’t been trying particularly hard. He leant against the sill of the open window, his forearms crossed, his cigarette dangling in the cool morning air. By some miracle, the column of ash at the end never dropped away.

This land had been a priory, once. Aziraphale had actually been here about nine hundred years ago, give or take, to bless the burial of its founders. Admittedly, he’d been here far more often since they’d put an opera house up the road. But there was a lingering sense of piety in these places, even after all this time. It stuck in the air like perfume, occasionally catching you by surprise in the back of the throat.

The sun was considering rising. Grey, milky light had been bleeding into Aziraphale’s view for a while now, touching the cold sides of the castle, the leaves of the trees, the sight of a market town emerging slowly from sleep. Aziraphale put the cigarette back between his lips and breathed in. Cherubino’s voice had been very beautiful, last night. It slid unobtrusively around his mind. _Voi, che sapete che cosa è amor…_

Aziraphale had come down for the opening of the new theatre at Glyndebourne. It was all rather frightfully modern, but the old place had been sorely in need of expansion, and these sorts of receptions were usually jolly enough. The whole thing wasn’t generally Crowley’s cup of tea. But, well— it was out of town, and Aziraphale had mentioned to Crowley that he was going, when he’d stopped by the bookshop for a nightcap a few weeks before. Crowley had been as distractedly uninterested as one might expect, and Aziraphale had left it to him to remember or forget as he preferred.

Then: “Thought I might come,” Crowley had said, mooching into the shop that afternoon, as Aziraphale was having his last cup of tea before heading to Victoria. “Not got much on. Plus there’ll be loads of rich old people to infuriate by suggesting that the programme ought to start incorporating hip hop.”

“Hip hop,” said Aziraphale, vaguely, half-wondering if he should pack a picnic here or pick something up in Lewes, half-thinking about hopscotch.

“Don’t mind, do you?” Crowley asked. “The infuriating, I mean.”

Aziraphale thought about it. “Low level’s fine,” he said. “Not enough to cause an incident.”

“You’re on.”

Crowley had been as good, or, more accurately, as Bad, as his word. It had been a lovely evening— a _Marriage of Figaro_ that more than lived up to the occasion, and the new theatre quite delightful, light and airy and comfortable, with fabulous acoustics. Crowley had been slumped in the seat next to him in their box, chewing his lip, but his eyes, behind his glasses, were fixed on the stage.

“I was here for the first ever performance, you know,” Aziraphale told him, in the bar. “Sixty years to the day. The very same opera.”

“You’ve mentioned,” said Crowley. “Reckon anyone else here was? That old girl must be ninety-five if she’s a day.”

“And for its first performance in Vienna,” Aziraphale mused.

“Yeah, think she might’ve been there, too.”

Crowley was, Aziraphale knew, laughing at him, in his peculiar, almost invisible way. But this had never made Aziraphale feel as displeased or embarrassed as he thought it probably ought to, or indeed as he sometimes pretended to be. It was mocking, but not cruel; Crowley, for all he enjoyed disorder and disharmony, simply wasn’t a very cruel person. More than anything, it tended to make Aziraphale feel rather pleased to be worth finding funny. The constant little heartbeat of feeling that Crowley inspired in him kicked up a notch, made its presence known.

There was the sound of movement from the bed. Aziraphale had booked a bed and breakfast for the night, in case— well, just in case. If he had come on his own, perhaps he would have taken the last train, got back to the bookshop in the small hours. But perhaps he would have wanted to spend a comfortable night away, anyhow. A chance to replay some of the evening’s performance to himself in the peace and quiet, and to read something pleasant with a change of scenery. And of course if Crowley was to come, as he had, he would appreciate the bed, as he was.

The bed creaked. Aziraphale looked round to see Crowley rubbing one hand over his eyes, pushing the tangled curtains of his hair from his face. There was something about Crowley in moments like this— between sleeping and waking, not entirely yet his hard-edged self— that still caught Aziraphale by surprise. Something inside him rang, faintly, and his heart skittered.

Crowley had propped himself up on one elbow, and he blinked, eyes adjusting from the ease of darkness to the dim light from Aziraphale’s window. “All right?” he asked, muzzily.

“Splendid.”

“Time is it?”

“A little before five in the morning, I think.”

“Mm. Okay.”

Aziraphale turned back to the window and took a final drag. The exhale of smoke curled away into the damp, grey-green dawn. Then he flicked the end of the cigarette after it, which vanished into the air in a similar fashion before it could fall into the flowerbed below.

“Sleep?” said Crowley.

“I didn’t feel like it.”

“Huh,” said Crowley. “Still time.”

“It’s rather nice to be out of town,” said Aziraphale. “I’ve always liked this part of the country. I thought I might as well appreciate it. Enjoy the view.”

Aziraphale turned around, and Crowley’s yellow eyes were trained on him. “All right then,” Crowley said, lazy smile woven into the timbre of his voice. “Come here and you can watch me suck your cock again.”

This wasn’t a bad offer. Breath catching, Aziraphale went.

**1941, London**

There was a loud click as Aziraphale pulled the door of Crowley’s car closed behind him. For a moment he was alone, enclosed in this strange box of metal and rubber, sealed off from the night air outside.

It smelt like Hell in here, by which Aziraphale meant it smelt like what used to radiate from Crowley when he’d just emerged from some interminable performance review, sneering reflexively and shaking particles of ash from his hair. A sort of hot, oily, acrid scent, which Aziraphale was always reminded of when he was near factories or large railway stations. But it also just smelt a bit like Crowley himself.

Then the door on the other side of the car swung open, and Crowley slid inside. He closed his own door, rested his hands for a moment on the steering wheel, and then turned to look Aziraphale in the face.

“Where d’you want dropping?” Crowley asked. “You still at the bookshop?” And then, one eyebrow quirking upwards, “Bookshop still standing?”

Aziraphale’s hands tightened, just slightly, on the leather handle of the bag in his lap. “I assume you know the answer to both of those questions,” he said. “Since you knew I was here.”

Crowley tipped his head to one side. “Fair enough. Bookshop it is.”

Aziraphale’s surprise at having collided with Crowley here was matched only by the relentless thumping of his too-open heart. Only, of course, it wasn’t a collision. Crowley had come here with the purpose of finding him. Before Crowley could do whatever infernal magic would presumably coax this machine into life, Aziraphale cleared his throat, and said, “ _My friend and I_.”

“Sorry?”

“Or so you said. Just now. In the church.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Crowley rubbed the back of his neck. “That’s about right, isn’t it? In one way or another.”

Aziraphale’s body, unbidden, suffused with warmth. The same warmth had flared at the very sight of Crowley when he had first arrived: the unmistakeable shape of him at the end of the aisle, albeit hot-footed and ridiculous. And as Crowley had pulled Aziraphale’s bag of books from the ruins, the warmth had burned so awfully brightly that it nearly unbalanced him. Aziraphale had not so much forgotten what it felt like as tried to avoid thinking about it, these past decades. But there was no hope of ignoring it now, with Crowley here, a foot away, holding out an olive branch.

 _I don’t need you_ , Crowley had said to him, almost eighty years ago. Aziraphale had replayed this memory more times than he would care to admit: the twisting stab of unhappiness, the wretched, stupid disappointment. He knew, of course, that Crowley was a demon, and could not feel as Aziraphale did. It was quite impossible, against his nature, although he had always seemed to regard examples of profound connection between humans with something closer to professional curiosity than congenital disgust. And so Crowley might not need Aziraphale in the most fundamental way: but Aziraphale had thought that they were something to each other, and he had hoped that something had a value to Crowley. Crowley had, after all, always seemed to like him.

Stung, Aziraphale had stammered out _The feeling is mutual_ , a rather pathetic and obvious untruth, and left. It hadn’t been his finest hour. But he had been so tangled up in the shock and the stress of it, in Crowley’s sudden interest in holy water; and what was that, exactly, if not an indication that Crowley no longer trusted Aziraphale to hold up his end of their string of bargains?

It was hard to keep track of what they owed to each other, these days, and whether either or both of them might be owed an apology. But Crowley was, if not apologising, at least holding out a hand.

Aziraphale cleared his throat. “Yes, I’d have thought so,” he said, carefully. The branch taken, Crowley’s hand grasped. “It seems— silly, really, not to be, doesn’t it?”

Crowley smiled to himself, small and spiky. “It does,” he said. And then, to Aziraphale’s great surprise, he sang, quite tunefully: “When other friendships have been forgot, ours will still be hot…”

Aziraphale blinked. The idea seemed ludicrous, but it occurred to him that in almost six millennia, he had never once heard Crowley sing.

“Heard that one?” Crowley asked.

“I don’t think so, no.”

“It’s one of mine, actually.”

“One of yours?” repeated Aziraphale. “Sorry, have you been… composing music?”

“Oh, not really. Well, yes. Well, sort of. Helped a few people out here and there.”

“What’s brought that on?”

Crowley shifted in his seat. “I thought I’d travel a bit. Been in Europe for such a long time, really, and… anyway. I was in New York for a while, a few years back. When were you last there?”

“Not since it was New Amsterdam.”

“Oh, angel, you’re going to have to go back. Broadway, you’d love it, honestly. And plenty for a demon to get involved with too, of course. You wouldn’t believe the number of people willing to do anything for success, and I do mean anything.” Crowley scratched his chin, and seemed to remember the point he’d been trying to make. “Anyway, long story short, thought I’d kill two birds with one stone, and have a crack at reducing the breadth of musical expression _and_ human emotion to a rhyming couplet or two. Get a few chords under your belt and you can make the most beautiful things in the world so banal they become meaningless. Plus, if you’re good enough, you can get the tunes stuck in people’s heads, drives them mad.”

“I see,” said Aziraphale, slightly taken aback. “All part of a devilish plan, then. Very good.”

“And then there’s radio,” said Crowley, grinning. “Think about it. All I have to do is come up with a couple of minutes of derivative nonsense, and suddenly hundreds of thousands of people are stuck with it at the same time.”

“Very clever,” said Aziraphale, and, as usual, he supposed it was. He didn’t say that he thought the little snatch of melody Crowley had sung had actually been rather nice, in case this annoyed him.

Aziraphale had been aware, as they sat side by side in Crowley’s stationary car, that a weight was lifting. It was almost a physical lightening in his chest. Some great stone over his heart had begun to shift, ten minutes ago, at the first sight of Crowley at the end of the aisle. Perhaps it was that funny little moment of music, the incongruous levity of it, that helped the stone to shift even further now. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t so very long since they’d seen one another. It had once been perfectly unremarkable to spend centuries apart. And yet Aziraphale was a little overcome to realise how heavy the weight of Crowley’s recent absence had been.

He had looked for Crowley in earnest, a quarter of a century ago. Britain had been at war with Germany then, too. Acts of human aggression were not at all new, but Aziraphale had begun to worry at the pace at which the wider conflict was unfolding. Not that it had anything like Crowley’s fingerprints on it: indeed, the sheer scale of worldwide enmity was a worrying indication that this could be something bigger than either of them. But Aziraphale had clung as best he could to the belief that no matter what either he or Crowley might have said in the heat of an unpleasant moment, if the Apocalypse really was coming in the guise of mustard gas and sub-machine guns, Crowley would have found a way to send him word.

Crowley hadn’t been in London: this Aziraphale could be sure of, having pretended not to look for him in all of his usual hiding places for most of a year. Aziraphale was also fairly certain he hadn’t gone to the front, which seemed not at all his style. Why fire one shell when you could help make a thousand? And so Aziraphale had travelled north, walking with increasing unease past factory gates in Birmingham and Manchester and Liverpool, scanning the faces of the munitions girls for a twist of red hair and a tell-tale slant of cheekbones, but to no avail.

He had found his way into hospitals on the way, where he was generally mistaken for an orderly and assumed to be a Quaker, and having a certain fondness for the Quakers, hadn’t bothered to correct anybody. He’d done what he could, managed the tricky removal of infection from a few wounds, but managed fewer removals of whatever made the men thrash in noisy agony at night. His cool hand on a hot forehead was enough to ease a bad nightmare, but not to extricate whatever was causing it.

In Princes Street Gardens, in the middle of the day, a woman had approached him and placed a single white feather in his buttonhole, beautiful and pristine in the sunlight. For a fleeting, inexplicable second, it was like being recognised; almost as if Crowley were there, and speaking to him. _Angel_. Aziraphale had gazed at the feather, amazed, and thanked her. But the woman had been nonplussed, as well she might, and only told him to wear it until he decided which side of the war he was on. It had been a challenge of cowardice, of course. Aziraphale had plucked the feather out of his waistcoat between thumb and forefinger, and wondered if Crowley might have gone somewhere else entirely. Perhaps he had found some island in the middle of the Pacific with a hot sandy beach to curl up on and wait the whole thing out. Perhaps he was right to.

And yet it was Crowley who had found him. Indeed, Crowley had not only found him, but done him a kindness: there would have been a terrible amount of unpleasantness to deal with if Aziraphale had actually been discorporated, and quite possibly an equal amount of unpleasantness if he’d had to incapacitate his supposed captors himself. It could sweep Aziraphale’s feet out from under him, still, Crowley’s strange, occasional propensity to be kind. Perhaps it was a behaviour he had learnt from Earth, and found it interesting to experiment with, but for obvious employment reasons was prevented from visiting on humans. Perhaps Aziraphale was the only other option.

Whatever Crowley might have intended, it made Aziraphale’s heart beat out its usual practised refrain. He repeated to himself the familiar reminder, by rote, of his duty. Love of the Almighty. Love of the Almighty’s divine messengers. Love of people, made in the Almighty’s image. Love of bird and beast. Love of forest and plain and desert. Love of stream and shrub and stone. Love, of course, of sinners and demons. One thing among many, that oughtn’t to consume him.

“So,” Aziraphale said. “‘Anthony’.”

Crowley, who had been smiling to himself in the way he always did when he was particularly proud of a good piece of work, coughed, and then looked quite embarrassed. “Right, yes. About that.”

Aziraphale said, “I don’t mind, you know.”

“I didn’t really think it would come up while you were around.”

Aziraphale allowed himself a smile. “I really don’t mind. You should keep it. It suits you.”

Crowley swallowed, and dipped his head, so that the yellow of his eyes flicked up over the rim of his glasses. “Does it,” he said.

Aziraphale felt the air shift around them. That hellish industrial smell had faded, or else he’d just become used to it rather quickly. Or perhaps, since Crowley had followed him into the car, Aziraphale had been assailed on all sides by every sense of him instead, leaving no room for anything else. The angular lines of him folded inside his suit. The all too familiar cadence of his voice, the click of his teeth, and that unexpected slide into a moment’s music. The smell of his skin and his pressed clothes, cold from the night air. Perhaps feeling left out, Aziraphale’s fingers twitched, and his mouth watered.

“Let’s not go to the bookshop,” said Aziraphale. “Not yet. Let’s go somewhere else first.”

“Yeah,” said Crowley. He looked bright and quivering and hungry. “Yeah, all right.”

At the edge of Aziraphale’s attention, a loud wailing sound began, expanding and contracting in the darkness outside. Aziraphale leaned forward abruptly and pressed his mouth to Crowley’s. It was like sighing with relief. Crowley pulled his glasses off with one hand, and laid the other hand against the side of Aziraphale’s face. He made a small noise in the back of his throat, and Aziraphale heard it a hundred times louder than the siren in the streets.

“Or we could just stay here,” Crowley murmured, against his mouth.

Aziraphale’s heart was hammering. “That’s the all clear. People will be out again soon. To check the damage.”

“Walk right past us,” Crowley said, “if I want them to.” His hand, dry and warm, slid over Aziraphale’s, and Aziraphale realised he hadn’t once let go of the bag in his lap. For a moment, they held its handle together.

“I’ve missed you,” said Aziraphale, quite by accident.

Crowley drew in a sharp breath. Then he lifted Aziraphale’s hand to his mouth. He pressed his tongue, the undulating tip of it, to the centre of Aziraphale’s palm, and Aziraphale’s body began to sing.

**1753, Venice**

There was something in Crowley’s vestigial reptilian nature, quiet and low to the ground, that allowed him to make a habit of appearing rather alarmingly at Aziraphale’s elbow, usually before Aziraphale was even aware they were both in the same room. Aziraphale would be busy paying the proper attention to a concert, or about to tuck into a quiet dinner, when he heard Crowley’s voice beside him, a sudden, familiar murmur on the air. Aziraphale had never quite ascertained whether or not Crowley did this on purpose.

And so it was rare for Aziraphale to see Crowley from any distance, and rarer still for Crowley to be unaware he was being observed. On the opposite side of the ballroom, across the scent of candles and summer sweat, Crowley was leaning against the wall. The lick of flame of his hair was swept back almost tidily in a small tie, and he was gazing in the direction of the dancers, the stem of a glass lounging between his fingers.

The room was overflowing. People went by in a whirl of colour amidst a giddy curlicue of quick music, and joy and love and delight were bouncing off each other from all directions. It should have been difficult to pick out any single being within it all, and yet Crowley, a sharp ink-stroke of red and black, stood out as if he were in a single beam of light. Heaven itself could not have illuminated him with more clarity.

With an inkling that this last thought might be in some way blasphemous, Aziraphale stopped thinking it. Anyhow, the moment was fleeting. The dancers were moving back and forth, round and round, and Crowley’s attention seemed to follow them, his head turning. Then he saw Aziraphale, and smiled. It was a rather knowing and not entirely reassuring smile, but no less lovely for it.

Aziraphale lifted his chin, and then his glass, in Crowley’s direction. Crowley raised his own glass in return, and then a pair of dancers reeled just in front of Aziraphale’s vision, and Crowley disappeared. Aziraphale finished his wine, cleared his throat, and glanced instinctively to his left.

“Evening,” said Crowley, from his right.

Aziraphale swallowed, and turned around. “Good evening, Crowley.”

“Fancy seeing you here.”

“Indeed.”

“In the area for long?”

“Oh, just a passing visit.”

That small smile was still playing around Crowley’s lips. “Well, how fortunate to run across you. Are you working?”

“I’m always working,” said Aziraphale, which in a sense was true.

“Oh, of course. But anything specific?”

“Well, I got your letter, you see, so I thought…”

“Ah,” said Crowley, with a pleased twitch of his mouth that made it clear he had been waiting to hear exactly this. “Funny thing, that. I thought you must have missed it, what with your being here.”

Crowley’s letters— which, depending on a variety of factors, sometimes arrived in a cluster over the space of weeks, or sometimes a century apart— were delivered with all the alacrity of Hell, and were literally impossible to miss. (On more than one occasion, Aziraphale had actually received a letter while in a coach in transit in the middle of the countryside, handed to him by a delivery boy who looked very surprised to have caught up with him.) Crowley’s latest missive, which had arrived a few weeks ago, had been a brief and rather entertaining sketch of Venice, and a suggestion that if Aziraphale had any business to be conducted in the area and cared to provide the details, Crowley would be most amenable to their customary exchange.

Aziraphale cleared his throat. “I was only over there in Salzburg, you see, and I haven’t been to Venice since, oh, can’t be since the Republic was finding its feet, so I thought I might as well pop over and say hello.”

“I do see,” said Crowley. “And here you are. Well, where are my manners?” He produced a bottle from somewhere, and refilled both of their glasses. “To popping over,” he said, as the crystal clinked together.

The party was lavishly given: the food and drink continually replenished, the great hall bright with countless candles, the players in the band— Aziraphale would have to try and introduce himself later— remarkably virtuosic. The music crested over everything else, the strings carving out a pretty set of pathways for the dancers in the middle of the room. Aziraphale felt a great warmth welling inside him, as he always did on such occasions, at the human joy suffusing the air. There was love there, too, as usual: it was hard to find a spot on Earth without it, but there were flashpoints. This seemed to be one of them.

He and Crowley had much to catch up on, having last run into each other some decades previously in the Baltic states. They circled the room together, a slow, inexorable perambulation around the outside of the dancers, and in the opposite direction. Aziraphale had news from England, where he had recently been based; Crowley had families to advise against and coffee-houses to recommend, if Aziraphale was planning on staying in Venice for long.

“Not that I’d imagine you’d want to,” Crowley said. “Veritable den of iniquity, Venice, you know. A different vice round every corner.”

Aziraphale tried not to smile at this. Venice in fact appeared to be exactly the sort of place in which Crowley thrived. It attracted noise, profligation and indulgence, and clearly made for a successful demonic playground without having to dig too far into the depths of human depravity. Crowley had never mentioned, or perhaps had genuinely never realised, that on the occasions they met in places far more seriously damned— cities in the grip of dictators, villages razed and ravaged by war— it was Aziraphale who was always more comfortable. These kind of places tended to make Crowley look rather awkward, mumble something about his job already being done for him, and slink off out of the way while Aziraphale got on with whatever needed doing.

“You wouldn’t like it here,” said Crowley, sounding fairly pleased with himself.

“No, I’m sure,” agreed Aziraphale, who’d had a very nice day sightseeing. “I was actually planning to go back to London in the next few days. I’m thinking of establishing a more permanent base of operations.”

“In London?”

“The climate suits me,” said Aziraphale, at which Crowley looked unimpressed, but shrugged. “I thought I might open a bookshop.”

“Why? You don’t like people touching your books. You definitely wouldn’t like people buying them.”

Aziraphale balked a little at the thought. “It could be a very unprofitable bookshop.”

“I’ll say. Just get a big house,” said Crowley, with a flick of his hand that encompassed the room around them. “And put a library in it. Then you can be the only person who gets to touch them.”

Aziraphale considered this. “But I wouldn’t need the rest of the house. It seems a bit of a waste.”

“Yeah, well, welcome to Europe, angel,” Crowley said, and grinned at him. “Might as well join in. Speaking of which.” He tipped his head sideways, in the direction of the centre of the room. “Care to dance?”

Aziraphale looked at Crowley. His posture somehow radiated both insouciance and challenge, and he was in the restless, provocative, glimmering kind of mood that meant Aziraphale knew very well where things would end up. He had known it as soon as they had seen one another across the room, and, indeed, as soon as he’d opened his letter. Nonetheless, the manner of invitation was unusual.

“Oh, no thank you,” said Aziraphale. When Crowley frowned, he added, “I don’t,” by way of explanation.

“Don’t, or can’t?”

Aziraphale had never considered that there might be a difference. “Both, I suppose.”

“Could show you how,” Crowley suggested. “Simple once you get the hang of it.”

Rather unhelpfully for Crowley, whatever was happening in the centre of the room was one of the least simple examples of dancing Aziraphale could imagine. Everybody was arranged in a series of lines, or perhaps in a sort of box, and kept rapidly circling each other and swapping places to some hellishly complex pattern.

“I’m not sure about that,” Aziraphale said, fairly.

Crowley looked at the dance for a moment as if it had personally insulted him. Then he put his empty glass down on a low table, plucked Aziraphale’s from his hands and put it down too, and moved a step forward into the circle of holy space around Aziraphale. He placed one hand lightly on Aziraphale’s waist, and held out the other, palm up, for Aziraphale to take hold of. He was a warm, brittle presence, his face suddenly very close by. Aziraphale swallowed, and placed his hand in Crowley’s.

“Don’t listen to the music for a moment,” said Crowley, which, as Aziraphale had abruptly stopped listening to anything that wasn’t the sound of his voice, was not difficult. “Let’s do something easier. Think in three-four. Then when I step forward, you step back, and vice versa, like…”

Crowley nudged Aziraphale backward, gently, with a motion of the hips, and Aziraphale stepped in the direction he was bid. Then, with a twitch of Crowley’s fingers at his waist, it was suggested he move sideways, then back again. Then they turned. Crowley’s arm came just a little further around his waist, guiding him, and Aziraphale, unbreathing, leaned closer, making it easier to be led. And oh, what blessed relief it was, for a moment, to be shown so simply what to do. He let Crowley continue to show him.

They were now, he realised, somewhere in the middle of the room. The rest of the dancers had been parting around them as they moved, looking surprised but not unduly concerned. Aziraphale thought that if he’d gone to all the trouble of learning that very complicated dance only to have it rudely interrupted, he might have been a little annoyed. But perhaps Crowley had done something to sweeten their moods, or perhaps they were simply having too pleasant an evening to care.

In fact, the dancers were beginning to rearrange themselves into pairs. They pressed themselves together as he and Crowley had done, and started to whirl around in the same fashion, to the same tempo. And the music, which was creeping back into Aziraphale’s consciousness, was changing too. There was an odd, liminal moment where two tunes seemed to be vying with one another, and then the clash was resolved. The notes slowed and elongated until they mirrored the pace at which Crowley and Aziraphale were moving: one-two-three, one-two-three.

“See?” said Crowley.

Aziraphale, who did not trust himself to answer, kept moving, his hand tightening minutely on Crowley’s shoulder.

“You’re not bad,” Crowley said.

“I would be if you let go.”

“Not going to.”

And Crowley didn’t. They danced, Aziraphale’s unnecessary heartbeat almost as loud in his ears as Crowley’s unnecessary breath, until the music came to a crescendo and then wound to a close.

The dancers applauded the band, and Crowley said, “Would you like to see the rest of the house?”

Aziraphale breathed out. He remembered to let go of Crowley, his fingers falling away from his shoulder and the grasp of his hand. Crowley’s other hand lingered at his waist, for the briefest of moments. Aziraphale wished, sometimes, that Crowley was just a little less practised at giving him what he wanted. But it was rather too late for that.

Both of their footsteps echoed in the corridor outside the great hall, the click of heels striking against the music they’d left behind. Crowley was nodding in the direction that would take them back to the entrance hall, which was a surprise. Aziraphale would have expected them to slip further into the bowels of the building. Somewhere there would be a quiet, private chamber, dust-sheeted and out of use; or perhaps only temporarily empty of guests, Crowley wedging a chair under the door handle and saying, “That’ll probably do it.” Aziraphale knew the form of these interludes: opportunistic and half-hidden, shrouded in a quick, scuffling silence that didn’t exactly detract from their appeal.

But Crowley was leading him back towards the entrance hall, throwing a glance over his shoulder as Aziraphale paused. “You coming, or what?”

“Yes,” said Aziraphale, at once. “I just thought, there are more people this way, so…”

“Said I’d show you the rest of the house. It’s got three storeys.”

Aziraphale widened his eyes, although he had already caught up to Crowley, and was walking by his side. “Don’t you think that’s something of a liberty?”

Crowley smiled at him again, slightly roguish. “Maybe,” he said, “but is that going to stop you?”

Aziraphale, who already knew the answer to this, said, “Well, I don’t know.”

Crowley, who evidently knew the answer too, kept walking. But then he said, “All right, cards on the table, quite literally. I sort of own this house.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Yeah, so, we can go wherever we like.”

“How can you _sort of_ own it?”

“Is there any other sort of ownership?”

“Crowley…”

“I won it,” said Crowley, brightly. “Last month. Lose it again soon, I expect. Gambling, that’s another vice here, by the way. I’m very good at it. I’ll teach you that too, if you like.”

“No, thank you.”

“Suit yourself.” Crowley shouldered open the door to the entrance hall, which was cheerfully candlelit, chatter echoing off the marble floor and staircase. A few people were leaving, but more still seemed to be arriving.

“These are _your_ guests, then?”

Crowley shrugged, and seemed to regard the humans spilling in and out of the doors with a sort of affectionate disdain. “Suppose so. People will go anywhere where there’s music and booze, though, won’t they?”

“Won’t they indeed.”

Crowley’s hand, lightly enough that it could have been accidental— although it wasn’t— brushed against the skin of Aziraphale’s wrist, just below the cuff of his shirt. Aziraphale swallowed and turned to look at Crowley again, who said, “Do you want to go upstairs?”

At the top of the sweeping staircase there was a panelled landing, hung with portraits of, Aziraphale supposed, some of the house’s unlucky former inhabitants. But he had no time to investigate, because Crowley led him down another corridor, and then, all at once, into a large, dark room with its shutters closed.

Aziraphale blinked, his eyes adjusting, as Crowley closed the door softly behind them. But then there was a sharp click, and a fire crackled into life in the grate, and the candles in the sconces flickered into life. There were paintings in here, too, but they were all landscapes: bright blue skies and green-grey waterlines, boats and canals and palazzos, sunlight through the clouds. Polished, well-made furniture: chairs and an inlaid table, a great wardrobe in one corner, and an almost astonishingly large four-poster bed.

It was not as if Aziraphale and Crowley had never before had the leisure of privacy. Yes, there had been propped-closed doors and thin-curtained tents, and Crowley’s hand clapped warm over Aziraphale’s mouth at sounds from outside; but there had also been copses of trees far from the roadside, empty caves that echoed with the sound of the sea, and other kinds of rather rustic, fleeting solitude. There had even been beds, now and again, when circumstance allowed. But since only one of them tended to sleep for pleasure, and neither of them had ever possessed a dwelling in any serious sort of way, there had been fewer beds than Aziraphale understood to be usual in these kinds of situations.

Crowley hadn’t told Aziraphale where exactly he might be found in Venice— his letter, of course, had not ostensibly been an invitation— but they were used to finding one another. It hadn’t been difficult to rout out the most talked-about gathering in the city, and to assume quite correctly that Crowley would be generating some of the talk about it. But it hadn’t for a moment occurred to Aziraphale that Crowley might be inviting him— or not inviting him— to somewhere that was, in the very loosest sense, his. It wasn’t really his, of course. The house was full of the leftover trappings of human lives, and it wasn’t decorated or furnished at all to Crowley’s taste. It was a temporary arrangement. And yet Aziraphale was quite arrested by the idea that this room, for the moment, was theirs.

Crowley had circled around to stand facing Aziraphale, and for a moment they looked at one another. Then Crowley took his glasses off, folded them neatly with the fingers of the hand that held them, and said, “Glad you came.”

Aziraphale stepped forward and kissed Crowley for the first time in perhaps thirty or forty years. Not long ago, all told; he oughtn’t to have had time to miss it. Crowley felt familiar, tasted familiar, submitted with familiar patience to Aziraphale’s hand laid against his cheek. He hummed a familiar note as Aziraphale kissed him softly, one that Aziraphale liked to pretend was contentment, and perhaps it was intended to sound as if it was. Crowley had had a lot of practice at teasing out Aziraphale’s desires, over the centuries.

Usually, Aziraphale waited for Crowley to nudge things forward from here. Eventually there would be a skimming of Crowley’s fingers over his arm or chest or thigh, or sometimes he would simply edge Aziraphale backwards, until he was held upright between Crowley and the wall behind him. But Crowley was also well aware that the most effective temptation of all was to do almost nothing, and to leave Aziraphale the indignity of admitting his need. His need, at this precise moment, was overwhelming.

And so it was Aziraphale who put his hands on Crowley, smoothing his palms over his shoulders, his fingers beginning to twist open the buttons of Crowley’s waistcoat. Crowley made another humming noise of agreement— he always liked this, took obvious pleasure from Aziraphale’s hands on him— and then at last, at _last_ , he was touching Aziraphale. He made more efficient work of Aziraphale’s waistcoat, and then he slid one hand inside it, the warmth of his palm spread against Aziraphale’s skin through the linen of his shirt.

“Yes,” said Aziraphale, trying not to sound quite as grateful as he felt. “Please.”

Crowley’s hand fell in its well-run trajectory down Aziraphale’s body, skating from his ribs to his stomach, over the dip of his hip, and to the falls of his breeches. Here, Crowley spread his hand against him again.

“Angel— ” Crowley said, looking down and then up. He sounded vaguely concerned, as if Aziraphale had accidentally left some important possessions behind on the road, and then, quite suddenly, he didn’t look concerned at all. He smiled slowly, rested the heel of his hand in the gap between Aziraphale’s legs, and said, “Well I never.”

Aziraphale shifted his familiar-unfamiliar body, mouth dry. “Well, you once said— you intimated you might like…”

“I said nothing of the sort,” said Crowley, whose wide yellow eyes were glinting. “I said I thought _you_ might like it.” He had, indeed, said this with a level of conviction that had made Aziraphale slightly worried about how much he might like it. Now, eyebrows raised, Crowley added, “And that was centuries ago.”

“Yes, well. No reason to rush into things.”

“Had one of these for long, then?” Crowley’s fingers, maddeningly delicate, began to unfasten the falls of Aziraphale’s breeches.

“Not exactly.”

“Oh, recent development. Trying it on for size?” A pause, Crowley’s teeth clicking together in the quiet. “Liking it?”

Aziraphale actually hadn’t found that the manipulation of bodily appendages had affected him very much at all. Having clung to a long-ago-formed understanding that unnecessary change was generally more work than it was worth, he updated his human accoutrements as rarely as society allowed— and as someone who found the task of acquiring a new coat fairly bothersome, the idea of willingly altering his actual corporation had barely even occurred to him. But Crowley had once asked a question, and it had planted a corresponding question in Aziraphale’s mind; and, as questions always did, it had eventually borne fruit.

This morning, the fruit had appeared to be nothing more than a relatively unremarkable cosmetic alteration. But an intriguing difference in sensation had been asserting itself over the course of the evening. The effect Crowley could produce on his body was both the same as usual and yet entirely new: it was a hot, thrumming insistence of readiness, a wet pooling of want that he was finding it increasingly difficult not to think about.

“Yes,” said Aziraphale, inadequately, and at the same moment Crowley’s hand slipped beneath the folds of the shirt that had been tucked into his breeches, and curled carefully down around the new shape of him. The hand was hovering near enough that Crowley must be able to feel the heat coming from Aziraphale, close and confined between his legs, and yet he didn’t touch; he kept his fingers, which Aziraphale must have felt on every part of his body but this one, held precisely still.

The problem with whatever game Crowley was still playing was that, frankly, Aziraphale had lost it a very long time ago. He took hold of Crowley’s wrist and brought his hand to him, and pushed himself forward so that Crowley’s finger slipped along and, very briefly, inside him. To Aziraphale’s pleasure, Crowley gave a small, delighted gasp.

“You’re soaking, angel,” Crowley said, and Aziraphale closed his eyes. “Let’s get you seen to.”

Being seen to by Crowley, when he was in this sort of mood, could be an inescapably thorough experience. Backing them against the wall, Crowley made a mess of Aziraphale with nothing but the curve of two fingers and the tickling of his tongue against his neck, an indecent promise eventually fulfilled when Crowley divested him of his clothes and laid him out on the bed. At the first press of Crowley’s tongue between his legs Aziraphale came almost at once, shocked and shaking; but Crowley gave him no quarter, slipping his fingers back inside as Aziraphale was still shivering, and then his tongue again too. With both together he worked Aziraphale to a second, slightly less frantic climax, and only then, pushing himself to his elbows, did he raise his head and say, “All right, want to try getting fucked?”

Aziraphale did. He had been rendered so insensible that he had failed even to get a grasp on what sort of effort Crowley himself might be making for the occasion, but as Crowley knelt up from the bed his erection was obvious, and he was soon naked, at which point it became significantly more so.

Lying back against the flurry of pillows, Crowley crooked one knee and then beckoned Aziraphale to sit astride him. The position was not new, but the slick feeling of fullness as Aziraphale sank onto Crowley’s cock was intriguingly different: it was almost as if his body was pulling Crowley inside of it, parting for him with no resistance whatsoever. For a moment Aziraphale stayed completely still, breathing out. A new, deep pleasure, something to savour. But then Crowley’s hands were on his waist, and he was beginning to roll his hips, gently at first, nudging upwards further into Aziraphale, his tongue flickering out over his lower lip as he looked up at him.

It was incandescent. Aziraphale’s body was steeped in so much pleasure, and yet somehow it had space for more, lapping upwards from where Crowley was pushed into him and through the rest of his body in heady, mellow tingles. When Aziraphale reached down between them he was still very wet, and when he touched himself with Crowley rolling smoothly inside him he thought he might simply dissolve from the sensation. But he didn’t: only rocked, with Crowley’s help, to a third, long, slow finish, hearing himself gasp as Crowley formed an effortless connection between the parts of his body that were sparking together.

Aziraphale leaned downwards, catching his breath. His hands rested against Crowley’s chest, his wet fingers warm against Crowley’s skin. Below him, Crowley was holding very still. He was watching Aziraphale, his cock thick and hard inside him, his yellow eyes wide and his lips parted.

“Come on,” Aziraphale murmured, his breath light in the air, meaning: take your fill. Whatever you want from me, whatever it is I can give you.

If Crowley was not a vessel made for love— something that would only slide off him, could find no purchase in his soul— then he could, at least, have pleasure. This was something Aziraphale could pour into him, something that he seemed designed to experience, his eyes alight with it at the slightest touch, and Aziraphale thought that must be better than nothing. He had learnt the interesting quirks and tricks of Crowley’s human body, and could use them to great effect when given the chance, turning Crowley breathless and delighted in his arms. A mutually beneficial arrangement. Crowley did sometimes play at infinite patience, goading desire and fulfilment out of Aziraphale over and over, but after a while he would give in to his own wanting: and he particularly liked to fuck Aziraphale just after he’d come, when Aziraphale had been rendered happy and pliant from satisfaction, and Crowley could take some reward for it.

But Crowley, looking up at him with hazy eyes, still wasn’t moving. Eventually he raised one hand to brush against the white hairs of Aziraphale’s arm, and then, bending up and forward a little, he pressed a very gentle kiss to Aziraphale’s chest, just under his heart. “Aziraphale,” he said, softly, “you know that I— ”

While not unheard of, this brand of affection from Crowley tended to be employed earlier in proceedings. He had learnt very quickly the patterns of courtship behaviour: the whispers of sweet nothings, the quiet kisses to the back of a hand. Despite a professed ambivalence towards his job, Crowley was very good at it, as Aziraphale had long known, and so what Crowley offered him was always what Aziraphale wanted. A watertight excuse, or a divertingly quick wit, or unquestioned company. Kindness, often.

But for it to come now, while Aziraphale was weak and defenceless, his head bowed, was wickedly unfair. The half-sentence was so awfully close to what Aziraphale longed for but could not have that he felt it strike almost physically at something inside him, at the secret place where his soul was kept, and he rang all over in panic. He could not let Crowley say whatever he was about to say, and be forced to carry the memory of it with him afterwards. Not when it wasn’t true. Crowley couldn’t; demons couldn’t. Besides, Aziraphale would have been able to tell. He was a being made of love, and love called out to him when it hung in the air. There was a little of it everywhere, of course: a baseline that meant nothing in particular, easy to ignore. Aziraphale supposed this must be left over from the Almighty’s love that had created Earth, or perhaps from all the people who had left tiny traces of it behind, in every corner of every land, over the course of millennia. But if Crowley meant what he was about to say, Aziraphale would know.

And so Aziraphale moved, at once. He raised his head and rolled his hips, the movement sending waves of sensation through his over-stimulated body, and pulling a startled little moan out of Crowley’s mouth.

“What are you waiting for?” Aziraphale asked him, and then at last, growling, Crowley took him by the hips and rolled them over.

Crowley’s studied gentleness was starting to trickle away, and when Aziraphale wrapped his legs behind his back he began at last to really drive into him. Panting against Aziraphale’s throat, Crowley fucked him until the bed, heavy and stolid as it was, began to shake. He licked and bit at Aziraphale’s neck as Aziraphale slid a hand into his hair, holding on tight, spreading his legs and drawing Crowley in. It was desperately good, as were the sounds that Crowley made, harsh with fulfilment: and then Crowley kissed him suddenly on the mouth as he finished inside him in deep, hot pulses.

The silence afterwards seemed to ring in Aziraphale’s ears, but then, as Crowley rolled off him, he realised it wasn’t silence at all. Very faintly indeed, he could hear the music from the hall below. It rose like dust in the air, the strings sailing upward, and it still kept the rhythm that Crowley had set for them.

By his side, Crowley was huffing out a long, sated breath. Sometimes he fell asleep like this, seemingly by accident, curled hot and briefly quiet against Aziraphale’s side. Aziraphale would watch him sleep, and then watch him come awake, at which point Crowley, apparently embarrassed, would get up and begin lounging rather aggressively around the room instead. But now, still awake, he caught Aziraphale’s gaze and smiled at him.

Aziraphale did know that Crowley liked him. It was something more than simple familiarity: the specificity of Crowley’s liking was plain in the persistence of his interest in Aziraphale, the tone of his letters, the amusement in his eyes when they met. It was more than one might reasonably expect from one’s hereditary enemy. And yet Aziraphale could not rid himself of the habit of casting about in the air around him, just now and again, for that spark of something more, even though it wasn’t there.

“Fun?” Crowley said.

“Most educational,” said Aziraphale.

Crowley breathed out a quiet laugh. Then he sat up. His hair had come loose in Aziraphale’s hand, and he pushed the waves of out of his face. “What now?” he asked. “You eaten? We could have something up here, if you like.”

This sounded very pleasant, so Aziraphale tried to work out if and why they ought not to. “Shouldn’t we go back downstairs?”

“Why?”

“Aren’t you hosting a party?”

Crowley seemed to consider this. “Not very well I’m not,” he said, and despite himself, Aziraphale laughed too.

**1020, York**

“Another?” said Crowley, holding up the jug in the middle of their table.

It had been a long, complex, and ultimately ineffectual day. “Yes,” said Aziraphale, and held out his mug.

Lamplight flickered on the wooden walls of the little lean-to, not so much an inn as an opportunistic stall designed to serve food and drink to the people working on the river. Outside, the sounds of life continued: shouts of recognition, cargo being unloaded. Trading and haggling, even this late in the evening.

It was nice to see Crowley. He had bought Aziraphale dinner, not exactly in apology, but out of what Aziraphale had taken to be a sort of professional courtesy.

It was sometimes several months into a complex job before Aziraphale and Crowley ran into each other, discovered that they had been given equal and opposite assignments, and were both therefore achieving almost nothing. At least this time it had only been a few days’ work. Aziraphale had been working assiduously to convince a local trader, without family and likely soon to die, to leave his wealth to the poor of the city: and Crowley, equally assiduously, to convince him to spend it all before the pox took him. In the end the man had ignored them both, and made out a will to a friend, another trader who was also wealthy in his own right. It was neither a heinous nor a particularly benevolent decision, and both Aziraphale and Crowley were now trying to work out if it would be possible to report this back to their respective head offices as a success.

“Perhaps it _does_ makes sense, you know, us both assigned to the same person,” Aziraphale mused, sipping from his freshly-filled cup.

“Does it?” said Crowley, putting the jug back down between them. “Seems like a colossal waste of time to me.”

“It’s the whole point of this, though, isn’t it?” Aziraphale said, gesturing between the two of them. “Giving humans the choice. We don’t have one, but they do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Say you offer the same human the opportunity to do good or to do evil,” Aziraphale explained. “As, you are aware, we quite often literally do. The point is, it really is a choice, for them. Free will, you see. That’s what all the testing is about,” Aziraphale said, glancing upwards. “But what _that_ means is that the humans who choose to be good when they _could_ choose to be evil have proved that they’re very, very good indeed.”

“And that they’re less fun.”

“Unlike you and me,” Aziraphale said, ignoring him, and warming to his theme, “because we have our ineffable natures, and there’s no choice in the matter. I’m bound to do good, because I’m a messenger of the Almighty and a conduit of love, and you’re— well, you’re a demon. So you’re the opposite, and there’s nothing you can do about that, either. Which is why I don’t hold it against you.”

“Appreciated,” said Crowley, his mouth quirking into a small smile.

A few jugs in as they were, Aziraphale considered that the unexpected pleasure of catching up with Crowley probably outweighed the inconveniences of the day. Spending time with him generally meant both an invigorating philosophical tussle and the opportunity to get properly drunk, which they had discovered several millennia ago was a significant shared interest. Crowley was also funnier than most monks, and surprisingly interested in Aziraphale’s stories about manuscript illumination, though this was partly because he liked suggesting things to draw in the margins. He was, in fact, always interested in Aziraphale in general. Which was— nice.

“What’s it like?” Aziraphale said, before he’d quite realised he’d done so.

“What’s what like?” asked Crowley, slowly.

Aziraphale gestured slightly vaguely in Crowley’s direction, and cleared his throat. “Well. Being a demon. And being bound to do evil. Is it like having a little voice in your head, reminding you of all the dastardly things you ought to be doing?”

Crowley pulled a face. “Why? That what it’s like for you, but with good deeds?”

“No, not really. I’m just trying to… imagine it.”

Crowley’s eyebrows crept above the line of his glasses. “Wouldn’t go exercising your imagination too publicly, angel. That way trouble lies.”

“Is it lonely?” Aziraphale asked, and then abruptly closed his mouth.

“Why would it be lonely?” said Crowley. “Tons of us down there, aren’t there? As well as all the humans to mess around with up here. And not to mention our little tête-à-têtes. Thriving social life for the modern demon, all told.”

“But,” Aziraphale brought his hand slowly up to somewhere near his own chest, “you were filled with the Almighty’s love, once. And now…”

Crowley seemed a little taken aback, although sometimes it was hard to tell, with the glasses. After a moment he said, “That was a very long time ago.”

“You don’t miss it?”

“Why would I?”

“I don’t know what I would be,” said Aziraphale, slightly struck by the thought of it, “if I couldn’t love all that was around me.”

Crowley looked at him for a moment longer. Then he shrugged, tipped most of the rest of his own cup of wine into his mouth, and said, “Well, luckily, I’m a demon, so it simply never crosses my mind.”

“Ah,” said Aziraphale. He supposed this was for the best. He was rather glad demons didn’t go about being permanently tortured by such things. They were the Enemy, of course, but it didn’t do to imagine anyone having so terrible a time as all that.

Crowley drummed his fingers briefly against his mug, and then sat back a little in his chair. He gave Aziraphale a long, appraising glance, and then seemed to come to some decision. “Listen, angel,” he said, “let me pitch you something.”

Lulled by the familiar patter of Crowley’s voice as he was, Aziraphale still recognised this to be vaguely dangerous territory. He swallowed. “Go on,” he said.

“We’ve both been up here a long time, haven’t we?”

Aziraphale nodded, slowly. “Or down here. As the case may be.”

Crowley waved his hand in acknowledgement. “And we’ve got used to it, the two of us. We both…” he shrugged, gestured around them. “Live like humans, mostly. Eat and drink like humans. Take a nap now and again.”

“Well, I don’t really sleep.”

“But you could, if you wanted to,” Crowley said. “Anyway. Point is, most of my lot think all that’s a waste of time. Lack of imagination, really. If they ask what you’ve been up to for the past couple of weeks, and the real answer is that you’ve been having a whale of a time at a solstice festival doing nothing in particular, because it’s fun— well, that’s quite hard to explain. To your lot as well, I bet. Am I right?”

“They are rather goal-focused,” Aziraphale agreed, carefully.

“But we,” said Crowley, and he leaned forward across the table, his voice dropping slightly lower, and Aziraphale, unthinking, leaned in too. “We’re the only ones who have been up here— down here— for all that time. And we get on well, wouldn’t you say? We rub along all right.”

This was close enough to Aziraphale’s own train of thought this evening that he frowned, briefly, in surprise. “Well, yes,” he said, and then he cleared his throat. “Though I get on with everyone, of course. It’s part of the job.”

It _was_ the job, really. Aziraphale had never actually been given a real job description, not since the redundancy proceedings around the Eastern Gate post, so he’d assumed he ought to just run with what he’d been taught in basic training. Nobody had ever said otherwise. Propagating the love of the Almighty, obviously, and all that came with it. Love of the Almighty’s messengers, of the people made in Her image, of bird and beast, of forest and plain and desert, of stream and shrub and stone. Of sinners and demons. Even though these last denied the Almighty’s love, and in their denial they could not return it, and mocked it; or in Crowley’s case, as he had said, simply did not think of it at all. But they were bound to receive it nonetheless.

“What I’m saying is,” said Crowley, carefully, “You. Me. Running around up here by ourselves. Nobody really paying us _that_ much attention, as long as we put in the paperwork.” He glanced briefly at the ceiling, and then at the ground, and then back at Aziraphale. He flickered his tongue over his lips, raised his eyebrows, and said, softly, “I think that we may have some mutual interests.”

Aziraphale’s pulse jumped in his throat. He and Crowley had been circling one another for long enough; and this last half-millennium or so, it seemed, even more than usual. They did get on well, and they did take a natural interest in one another. And— well, Aziraphale wasn’t blind to all of the facets of that interest, from Crowley’s side. He was a demon, and carnality was in his nature. Aziraphale didn’t mind. It was rather nice to be paid attention to. And there was no sin from Aziraphale’s perspective in an aesthetic appreciation of Crowley’s form.

They had made something of a game of this mutual interest, over the years, safe in the knowledge that it was for mild entertainment only. A comment, a glance, a turn of phrase that Aziraphale pretended not to understand. But this… Aziraphale bit his lip, and looked at the unblinking yellow of Crowley’s eyes where he was peering over his glasses. This seemed like a suggestion that they change the rules.

“What do you propose we do about them?” Aziraphale asked, delicately. “The… interests.”

“Oh, you know,” Crowley shrugged. “We could lend each other a hand. Just now and again.”

Aziraphale’s breath quickened, and his lips pursed, and most interestingly, his skin began to prickle. He was growing very warm. A physical exchange of love was quite above board in the abstract, and Aziraphale, curious, had found such an experience to be pleasant enough with a handful of humans he had been especially fond of. He was fond of Crowley, certainly. But Crowley was a demon, and so such an exchange was impossible.

But while a demon couldn’t love, a demon could be— well, distracted from causing trouble. Crowley was generally very amenable to that, as their long dinners off the clock could attest. Yes, if Aziraphale was busy acting as a conduit for love, which was Good, and Crowley was busy _not_ doing something Bad, then overall, that worked out well, didn’t it?

Aziraphale took a deep breath. “Yes,” he said. “I think we could.”

“Hoped you’d say that,” said Crowley, and smiled. “Take today, for example— the whole of this last week. Waste of time for us both, wasn’t it? Bloke didn’t end up good _or_ evil. Just normal. We could have got exactly the same result by leaving him to his own boring devices. Could have had the week off.”

Aziraphale blinked, his mouth dry. “Wait a moment,” he said.

“So if we actually kept in touch with each other, we could see when we’re going to cancel each other out before it happens. We actually _could_ have the week off.”

“Ah,” said Aziraphale. He sat back slowly in his chair. Crowley had meant something else entirely. Mutual business interests. Of course.

“Or,” said Crowley, “and hear me out on this one, angel— we could even cover for each other, now and again. Not on the big stuff, obviously, but honestly, your bog-standard temptation? Piece of piss, you could do it in your sleep. And I could probably,” he shrugged, in a slightly wriggly way, “dust off the old blessing muscles, if I had to.”

“Right,” said Aziraphale, on an indrawn breath. “Yes, I see. I see what you mean.” Crowley did, unfortunately, make a good argument.

But Crowley, who was always watching him, had pulled up short, his next words still on the tip of his tongue. He gave Aziraphale a long, curious stare, and then said, “Is that not what you thought I meant?” When Aziraphale didn’t answer, he said, with a sudden dark edge of intrigue to his voice, “What did _you_ mean?”

Aziraphale, horribly flushed and stupidly embarrassed, worried his fingers at the edge of their rough little table. “Nothing,” he said. “That is, only exactly the same as you.”

Crowley sat back in his chair, too, so that they reflected one another. He crossed his legs, one ankle resting on his knee, and looked at Aziraphale in fairly frank surprise. They both said nothing. And then, unexpectedly, Crowley backed down.

“Good,” he said. “So we’re on the same page. You won’t regret this, you know.”

“I’m sure,” said Aziraphale, slightly regretting it instantly. **  
**

**124 AD, Britannia**

Aziraphale stood alone at the crest of the hill. From here, there was a vast, spreading view into two lands, or into one land divided, depending on how you looked at it. The view was gorse-green and heather-grey and beautiful in its starkness. Or at least it would be, if he hadn’t been surrounded entirely by fog.

He had been stationed here for long enough to have the lay of the land, but not long enough to have tired of it. Aziraphale liked, sometimes, to be alone with himself, especially after long stretches of time doing rather complicated things with rather complicated humans. He liked doing that too, of course, and after not very long he’d begin to miss them, not to mention all their food and amenities and entertainment. But sometimes, when he could get himself to some far-flung mountaintop, or some warm serene desert, or some corner of a chilly little island like this, he rather liked being there by himself, too. Nobody watching him, nobody asking him questions, nobody spoiling what the Almighty had made, so very long ago.

There was a movement in the swirl of the fog. Aziraphale squinted, rather amazed. He had inveigled his way into this post mainly for the extreme unlikelihood of running into anyone else. Such an inaccessible point ought to be of no use to the local bands of cattle-raiders, let alone anything like a more coordinated assault. A lone traveller seemed even more unlikely and more ill-advised. But there it was again: the distinct shape of a figure in the distance, climbing up the hill through the mist, before it was swallowed again into nothingness.

Aziraphale cleared his throat, surprised. He supposed he ought to be ready to mount a defence; there was a dagger at his belt, although that seemed a bit much. He settled for calling out, “Hello?”

The sound of his voice slipped away into the thick greyness around him, disappearing, and for a moment, Aziraphale wondered if he hadn’t imagined the figure after all. But then it shifted into his vision again— a dark outline, but distinctly real. It was a Caledonian, as he had assumed. There was no quiet clash of metal as he walked, only the silent approach of an unarmoured, light-footed man, although he might be no less dangerous for it.

The man was close enough to see properly, now. Rather underdressed for the weather in a pair of woven trousers, his face and torso were smeared with mud and whorling patterns of blue woad, his hair long and red and wild, whipping about his face in the wind. His eyes glinted yellow through the mist.

“Crowley?” Aziraphale called, surprised.

Crowley peered at him out of the gloom. “Angel? Is that you?”

Crowley had never had the trick of looking much like a warrior, but he did, Aziraphale thought, convince as someone who might cut your throat in the night. Nonetheless, Aziraphale felt nothing so much as an unexpected swell of warmth at being recognised, seen, by someone who knew what he was. _Angel_. Yes.

“Good afternoon, Crowley,” he said, quite pleasantly surprised.

“Is it?” Crowley asked, as he reached Aziraphale’s little outpost. He wasn’t out of breath, but he did look rather tired. He planted his hands on his hips, gave Aziraphale in his armour a quick, interested look up and down, and then cast his eye along the line of the wall behind him stretching away to east and west, disappearing in a winding line into the distance. He frowned, and gestured loosely at the expanse of it. “The fuck’s this?”

“This?” said Aziraphale. “This is the wall.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” said Crowley. “Why?”

“Well. It’s a project of the Emperor Hadrian. It’s the northernmost border of the Roman Empire.”

“Huh,” said Crowley, giving it an appraising once-over, and apparently, dismissing it. “Seems like a lot of work for nothing.”

“On the contrary, I think it’s rather a good idea. It’s still being built, further along, but this section is proving quite effective so far.”

“Bit obvious, isn’t it?” said Crowley, which was, Aziraphale thought, a surprisingly aesthetic issue to take with one of the biggest politico-military projects of the century.

“That’s rather the point. Symbolic. It’s quite clever, really— on the one hand it’s a show of strength, but on the other it’s actually a sensible decision not to go on conquering any further. It’s supposedly a defence mechanism, of course, but in practice it seems to be functioning as more of a checkpoint for travellers in both directions. It’s all quite well thought through.”

“Anything to do with your lot, then? Bit of divine inspiration?”

“Oh, no, all human. You must know Hadrian. He’s a terribly interesting man, actually. Big fan of the Greeks.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that,” said Crowley.

“I like your trousers,” Aziraphale said. “What’s that pattern?”

“Oh.” Crowley looked down at himself, where the dark grey wool he was wearing was interwoven in broad squares with shades of red, like a sort of chequerboard. “It’s the local look. Just blending in.”

“Very nice,” Aziraphale said. “Suits you. So what are you doing all the way out here?”

“Oh, the usual. Inspiring discord and dissent.”

“And you couldn’t do that somewhere warmer?”

“Yeah, you’d think,” said Crowley. “But there’s a specific bit of inter-tribal trouble to stir up. Band of warriors coming this way that I’m supposed to infiltrate. I thought maybe I’d missed them.”

“Oh, no, nobody’s been along here in days. Weeks, actually, other than dispatches from the forts.”

“Nobody?”

“Not a one.”

Crowley frowned. “Oh. Maybe I’m in the wrong place. Can’t see a blessed thing in this weather.” He narrowed his eyes, their glow thinning as he scanned what remained of the horizon. Then he turned around to look at the wall behind them, craning his neck. “Mind if I have a quick look up there?”

“Not at all.”

Crowley surveyed the expanse of well-hewn stone in front of him, and Aziraphale thought, for a moment, that he might change his form to climb it. But instead, lithe and light-footed, Crowley gripped the jutting imperfections of the facade, slightly too small to be real handholds, and scaled it easily, in a way that wasn’t quite human.

Aziraphale watched as he reached the top. This was the highest point of the wall for miles around, and as Crowley stood up, he was marked out dark against the overcast sky, the image of his shape shifting for a moment in and out of the thin mist. He was the only thing Aziraphale could see.

“Bollocks,” said his voice, distantly, on the wind. “I think I must be too early.”

“Better than too late,” Aziraphale said.

“You what?”

“I said— ” said Aziraphale, and then sighed. His armour ought to be something of a hindrance, but if he concentrated, it wasn’t. He climbed the wall as Crowley had done, hand over hand, feeling his human form thrill in surprise at being compelled to do something that shouldn’t be possible. He pulled himself to his feet beside Crowley. “I said, better than being too late.”

“Mm,” Crowley agreed, possibly.

He was still peering out across the landscape, on the Caledonian side, and then, presumably hedging his bets, turned around and had a look over the Roman side too. The view was a little better up here, with the added height, although it still blurred away into the mist. There wasn’t a soul in sight.

“Ah, well,” said Crowley. He turned to look at Aziraphale, and, for a moment, Aziraphale simply gazed back at him. It felt somehow very comfortable, to be stood here beside him. But Crowley, he realised, was studying his armour again, the plates at his shoulders, the baltea at his waist. Something in Crowley’s eyes glinted in barely-concealed amusement, and when he spoke, he seemed to be making an effort to sound nonchalant. “So,” he said. “You’re on guard duty.”

“Yes,” said Aziraphale, not at all snippily.

“And how’s that going?”

“Very well, thank you.”

“Take your word for it,” Crowley said. “They didn’t ask for references, then.”

Crowley’s mouth was curled up at the corners, and Aziraphale felt a little heat creep into the back of his neck, knowing that he was being laughed at. Although the laughter wasn’t, he was surprised to realise, unkind. Aziraphale was in fact being teased, something that was so entirely outside the remit of either Heaven or Hell that it was rather confusing. You couldn’t, he supposed, tease somebody you didn’t know. It was perhaps the closest a demon could come to kindness.

“They did not,” said Aziraphale, and Crowley grinned at him.

“Hey,” Crowley said, suddenly, eyes brightening, “We oughtn’t to be seen together.” He poked Aziraphale gently in the centre of his breastplate, and then glanced down again at the intricate designs on his own chest, his patterned trousers. “We’re enemies.”

“So we are,” said Aziraphale. He laughed briefly at the absurdity of it, and Crowley laughed too.

It had been damp and spitting all day, but as they stood gazing out at the hills below them, it began really to rain. Crowley wrapped his arms rather inhumanly around his torso, his elbows jutting out. Weather didn’t register particularly with Aziraphale, or at least not in terms of the comfort of his corporation, which simply adjusted its temperature according to what was required. Crowley, although not nearly as affected by extreme heat or cold as a human would be, seemed not to have the same built-in mechanism. Perhaps, Aziraphale considered, it was a specifically heavenly intervention.

“Fancy getting a wing out?” Crowley asked.

“I can’t do that here.”

“Who do you think’s going to see?” said Crowley, indicating the barren horizon, his eyebrows raised.

“Well, you get a wing out, then.”

“Harder to cover yourself up with your own wings. Always miss a spot.”

“Oh, I see,” said Aziraphale. “So as long as I can keep _you_ dry…”

“Exactly,” said Crowley, mouth quirking.

Aziraphale shook his head again, but he said, “Come back down here,” and when he climbed back to earth, Crowley followed him.

Aziraphale went to his baggage, tucked into a lee of the fortification. He had a standard issue undyed cloak, of which he usually had little need. He shook the cloak out, and then offered it to Crowley, who looked slightly surprised.

“Thank you,” said Crowley, the words sounding strange in his mouth. He took the cloak from Aziraphale’s hands, and wrapped it around his shoulders, where it hung from him in a way that Aziraphale wasn’t sure it had ever expected to hang from anything.

“You’re welcome,” said Aziraphale.

Crowley sighed, and looked up at the sky. The long line of his throat extended from the top of the cloak, and the red of his hair began to darken a little as it was flattened down by the rain. Then he looked out at the emptiness in front of them again.

“This is bullshit,” he said. “I’m going to go to sleep until tomorrow. If we can’t even see their camp, I’m at least a day early.”

“All right,” said Aziraphale.

“Come and have a nap,” said Crowley, eyes flicking back to him again, an unexpected shift of focus. “Bet you’d like it.”

“I’m on guard, remember?”

Crowley threw his arm out. “Against who?”

“Well,” Aziraphale said. “You, I suppose.”

“But I’ll be asleep too.”

“You could be lying,” Aziraphale pointed out, which was, with a demon, obviously always a possibility. “This could all be a ploy to neutralise me while you get up to something dastardly.”

Crowley rolled his eyes. “Angel, I’ve already told you what I’m here to do. And if I do ever decide to set up a piece of complex double-bluffing hellish iniquity in your presence, you have my word that I’ll do it somewhere far less fucking drizzly.”

Crowley’s word ought to be worth less than the particles of air it was made of, of course; but on the other hand, Aziraphale couldn’t actually remember Crowley having lied to him outright before.

“Well,” Aziraphale said. “I don’t exactly know how to do it.”

“Do what?”

“Sleep.”

“Really?” said Crowley, looking very interested. “Never even had a go?”

“Why would I?”

Crowley shrugged. “It makes you feel good,” he said. And then, “You like things that make you feel good.”

Aziraphale wasn’t sure how to take this, but he said, “Good how?”

“Comfortable. And then sort of refreshed, afterwards. Well, not at first— the bit where you wake up is weird, don’t know if I’m doing that wrong— but a little while later, it’s…” Crowley flicked his fingers next to his head, a tiny starburst. “Clears out the cobwebs. Something you couldn’t work out before, you might suddenly get your head round it without even trying.”

“Hmm,” said Aziraphale. He’d always felt a bit sorry for humans’ necessity for sleep; it took away so much valuable time that they could spend doing interesting things, and it tended to leave them so vulnerable. But Crowley’s version of it did sound rather pleasant. “All right, then, but just a taste. I don’t want to lose a whole night.”

“You’re on,” said Crowley. “Right. Bit of shelter helps.”

They moved a little way east, where the wall curved in on itself slightly as it began its descent from the top of the hill. Crowley propped up Aziraphale’s tall shield in its lee, and between that and the high stretch of the stone above them, there was a space that was protected from the worst of the wind and rain.

“Lie down with me, angel,” said Crowley, gravely, wriggling his way up against the wall, and Aziraphale, glancing pointlessly behind him, did. With his shield propped just behind them, and Aziraphale’s head close to the ground, the whistle of the wind died away almost completely, the air still and quiet between them. “And get comfortable.”

Aziraphale tried lying on his back, and then on his side, which was slightly better, what with the way his armour held his body steady. Crowley, too, was curled up on one side, so that they lay face to face.

“Not for too long, remember,” Aziraphale said. “How will I know to wake up?”

“You just will. Your body has a few tricks of its own, you know. Things you probably don’t even know it can do. How about just a couple of hours, to start with?”

“Yes, all right.”

“So just tell yourself, now: I’ll be waking up in a couple of hours. It works, I promise. And I’ll do the same, in case you get too into it and accidentally slip into a coma.”

“Crowley— ”

“Joking.”

“Well, don’t.”

Crowley’s mouth twisted in that strange little thing that wasn’t quite a smile, but wasn’t exactly anything else, either. “So, humans get tired enough that they don’t even know they’re doing it, but you’re going to have to switch yourself off manually.”

“I see,” said Aziraphale, slightly dubiously.

“But it’s not that hard. Start by breathing, and focus on that. Nice and slow, and in and out.”

Aziraphale had been breathing already— it tended to worry people when he didn’t, so it was one of the things he let his body get on with by itself— but now he paid it more attention. The air up here was clean and cold, and when he opened his mouth, he could feel it in his throat.

The last time Aziraphale had seen Crowley, nearly a century ago, he had been wearing dark lenses over his eyes. Aziraphale had wondered why. Well, to blend in with the humans, presumably, his eyes apparently one of the only things that Crowley couldn’t alter the appearance of; but Crowley had never been terribly concerned about blending in before, or at least not any further than what was required to get him wherever he wanted to go. They’d had rather an enjoyable evening together, oysters and wine and a slightly indecorous bout of work-related gossip. Nothing that ought to get either of them into trouble, but enough to have been— well, rather good fun. Perhaps the lenses had just been a brief experiment, not repeated. Aziraphale thought he would be glad if this was the case. Crowley’s eyes were fascinating at such close quarters, deep gold and fathomless.

Aziraphale blinked, startled, and tried to think again about breathing. He looked instead at Crowley’s chest as it rose and fell, and breathed in time with him.

“There you go,” Crowley said, “Easy as anything. Now, as the breath goes in, let it drift all the way through you. Don’t think too much about it. There. That thing at the centre of yourself. Just settle it. Let it calm down. Only for a little while.”

Aziraphale didn’t have much contact with this thing at the centre of himself. Oh, he knew it was there, obviously, but he rarely had time to examine it, touch it, pay attention to it. It was, he had always found, rather easier to get on with things that way. Crowley, he supposed, must be more in touch with his, or else he wouldn’t have been able to work out how to do this in the first place. Perhaps, for an angel that had fallen, there was no choice; perhaps the blackness of it was always bubbling over, drawing one’s attention, forcing you to get your hands stuck in there and root around.

At the centre of Aziraphale was, of course, the love from which he had been created. As in all things, there was a hierarchy. First and above all he loved the Almighty, God the Creator, who was Love Herself, and so who loved in return in perpetuity, a warm and constant imprint on the soul. Then he loved his fellow angels, God's messengers. These were Her most perfect creations and were filled with Her love, and therefore loved one another as they did everything else that She had made. Then he loved the people of Earth, the Almighty’s children made in Her image. These creatures had love of their own to give, too: they ran free with it the whole world over, dedicating that love to Her, and to Her messengers, and to each other, until it sang in the air. Next, he loved all else that the Almighty had made. The birds and the beasts, the things that swam and the things that crawled, many of whom had not been built to know love, but therefore did not mind it; and also the forests and trees, deserts and stones, streams and oceans, which had no minds at all, and simply existed in testament to the Almighty’s design. And last of all he loved the sinners and the demons, who cast love out of their own hearts, and would therefore reject it: and yet must be loved nonetheless.

As Aziraphale lay very still, watching Crowley’s face, he tried to stop the thing inside him tolling like a deep, mellifluous bell. He tried to calm it, like Crowley had said, to hush it, to smother its sound. Not to let it vibrate, suddenly, unstoppably, in every part of this thin human body.

“Good,” said Crowley, softly.

The last thing Aziraphale remembered before he slept was Crowley’s yellow eyes in the dark; and then nothing.


	2. Chapter 2

**327 BC, Bactria**

Crawly had been in Bactria for something less than two hours before he first saw the king, whom he had come here to find, and for something less than a day before he saw the angel, whom he hadn’t.

The king he had seen from some distance, the occasion having not been so much a private audience as a welcoming address to the exhausted, excited troops, and Crawly had been stationed towards the back. But this didn’t matter. He had been travelling for weeks to get here, and had plenty of time to get to work now that he had arrived.

Crawly had slipped easily into the ranks of red-headed, fair-skinned Macedonians who had made the march into Persia to refresh the long-fought campaign. Clean-shaven, his hair swept up on top and curled artfully around his face below, as per the young king’s fashion, Crawly might have been entirely indistinguishable from the others, were it not for the fact that his human corporation was a little tall for them. But this only made many of the soldiers look up to him, literally. Crawly found he liked this rather more than being looked down upon. No, he was long done, he thought, with wriggling around at people’s feet. Frankly, It was a bit demeaning. It also made it surprisingly tricky to remember how to get your legs back into the swing of things afterwards.

But even in human form, Crawly could slither around without attracting attention if he wanted to. And so he had made his way among the high-born and well-favoured young men who ranked the highest here, and joined them for the feast hosted by the king that night. It took a little demonic miracling to prevent them from asking exactly who Crawly was and why they should trust him in the king’s presence, but it ended up taking none to make them like him once he was there.

It was then, at the feast, that Crawly saw the angel. Aziraphale had come into the great tent through an entrance near the high table, and he was watching the king, waiting for an appropriate moment to approach. Crawly ducked his head, but Aziraphale, who seemed familiar enough with his surroundings not to be scoping the place out, hadn’t looked his way.

Crawly rested his chin on his hand and smiled. He hadn’t run into Aziraphale for several centuries, but he looked almost exactly the same as he always did. The north star and both poles could learn a thing or two from Aziraphale: his obstinate continuity of manner and appearance was a fixed point which Crawly had begun to find some obscure pleasure in orbiting.

He wasn’t particularly surprised to find Aziraphale here. In nearly four thousand years, it would have been rather more strange if they had never crossed paths, especially in the vicinity of humans who were making enough noise to attract the attention of both head offices. But he _was_ surprised to see that unlike Crawly and the Macedonians in their simple chitons, Aziraphale was wearing trousers and a sleeved jacket that looked something closer to the Persian manner of dress, considering that he had been wearing essentially a variation on the same robe for the last four millennia. Well, Crawly thought, the magnetic poles do shift, if only a little.

“Who is that man?” Crawly asked his neighbour at the table, nodding in Aziraphale’s direction. (Aziraphale, if he wanted to go unnoticed, wouldn’t be dressed differently to everyone else present: he must have established some position here that meant Crawly’s drawing attention to him wouldn’t scupper his plans. Crawly should, obviously, be scuppering his plans at some point, but no need to get ahead of himself.)

His neighbour, a veteran of the campaign, glanced up briefly. “Oh, that is Aziraphale, one of the eunuchs of the queen’s household.”

“ _Is_ it?” asked Crawly, trying not to grin too widely in surprise. “Unusual name, don’t you think?”

The man shrugged, not much concerned. “Probably from some Persian hill tribe. Get all sorts here.”

“Don’t you just,” said Crawly.

Aziraphale had now made his way to the high table, where he spoke briefly with the king. Although his approach had been carefully timed, and he spoke with the deference of a servant delivering a message, it was clear, Crawly realised with great interest, that the king both knew and liked him. He smiled unguardedly as Aziraphale spoke, and even bid him take a draught of wine before he left, which Aziraphale, with much thanks, did. Then he left the same way that he had come in.

Crawly was never sure what to do with the little spark of pleasure he felt whenever he and Aziraphale ran across one another. Aziraphale, of course, was officially the Enemy; but he was also a surprisingly game drinking companion, genuinely funny when he wanted to be, and significantly less self-righteous than one might expect. But none of this quite explained the little flame of longing that Aziraphale’s presence ignited in him. Crawly couldn’t find a good reason for it, or, rather, a Bad reason for it. Well, he supposed there was probably something useable in there about tempting an angel to fraternise with the forces of Hell, but that, unfortunately, didn’t really excuse how happy Crawly always was to see him.

Eventually the food was cleared away, but the wine continued to be poured, and the evening grew more raucous. Someone called for music, and a piper was summoned. Then someone said there ought to be dancing too. It seemed the king agreed, and some young and beautiful people were brought in to oblige.

When Aziraphale reappeared, even in amongst all the comings and goings, the music and laughter, Crawly saw him at once. This time he had entered through the back of the tent. He had paused to watch the boy who was dancing— a rather compelling wriggling of limbs under a spangled loincloth— but before long, Aziraphale’s regard had moved again to the young king at the other end of the feast. Stood in a corner, his expression soft with beatification, Aziraphale seemed to glow with some infinite well of grace. Crawly wondered that the whole tent’s gaze wasn’t drawn to him. Despite the fact he stood in shadow, the brightness spilling out of him was enough to light the entire camp ten times over.

Crawly allowed himself to watch Aziraphale quietly for a few moments longer. But then the dancing boy performed a backflip that was fairly impressive for somebody confined to a human spine, at which one of Crawly’s bench-mates cheered appreciatively; and Aziraphale, glancing in his direction, saw Crawly. His mouth fell open in surprise, and their eyes met. Even if Crawly had been looking in the opposite direction, he thought he would have felt the weight of Aziraphale’s warm regard falling on him. He shivered under it in strange, pained pleasure, as he always did, and then raised his cup minutely from the table. Aziraphale, after a moment, waved the fingers of one hand in response.

Crawly went to him, of course. Nobody noticed him slipping off the bench and sidling up to Aziraphale in the corner, apart from Aziraphale.

“Crawly,” he said, sounding almost pleased to see him. Dangerous territory, this, thought Crawly, sliding immediately further into it. “How are you?”

“Oh, same old. Just marched several thousand miles across Eurasia, you know how it is.”

“Good grief, did you really?”

“Well, all right, I may have been curled up inside a wagon for some of it. Or most of it. You?”

“Very well, thank you. Rather less marching on my part. I’ve been here for a while, actually.”

“Picked up the dress sense,” Crawly noted.

“Oh, yes…”

“And,” said Crawly, who couldn’t stay amused at anything by himself for very long, “I hear you’re travelling light.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Crawly cleared his throat, and mimed a brief, smooth chopping motion just below his hips.

“Ah,” said Aziraphale, sounding only slightly embarrassed.

“Nothing down there at all, or…?”

“You do know that’s not what a eunuch is, don’t you?” said Aziraphale, rather testily. “Anyway, it was all a bit of a misunderstanding, if you must know. But,” he added, brightening, “quite a useful one, in the end. If you want a proper overview of what’s going on, you can’t do better than spending time with women.”

Crawly, who had recently spent several decades as a priestess in Argos, said, “How very clever of you to have worked that out.”

“Thank you,” said Aziraphale, who hadn’t entirely got to grips with sarcasm.

The tent around them was filled with clapping and shouts of appreciation: the boy’s dance was done. Crawly and Aziraphale watched as he made a low, prostrated bow to the king, before a girl took his place in the middle of the tent, and began to stamp her feet on the beaten-earth floor. As the piper picked up her rhythm, so too did the men in the tent, cups thudding on the benches. Crawly’s pulse beat with them.

“So what _is_ it that’s going on?” he said.

Aziraphale glanced at him, his eyes slightly sharper. “Ah. We’re talking shop.”

Crawly shrugged. “Or not, if you prefer. Both here, though, aren’t we.”

“Yes,” said Aziraphale, and his gaze travelled back to the king at the high table. “You’re here for Alexander, I assume?”

“You too?” Crawly asked. Pointlessly, since Aziraphale’s interest, up until a few minutes ago, had clearly been nowhere else.

Aziraphale nodded, and then looked back to Crawly again. “You’re here to get rid of him,” he said, sounding rather resigned.

“What?” Crawly frowned, surprised. “No, absolutely not. Aren’t you?”

“Gracious, no. Why would I want to do that? And anyway, my side doesn’t _get rid_ of people, Crawly.” Crawly stared at him. “Well, not any more. Or— not very much.” Crawly blew out a half-amused breath, and rolled his eyes. “Well, what _are_ you here to do, then?” Aziraphale asked.

“I’m here to help him.”

“But _I’m_ here to help him.”

“Well, would you look at that.

“I don’t understand,” said Aziraphale, frowning. “That can’t be right. Well, it _can_ be Right, that’s why I’m here. So it can’t be Wrong. So why are you here?”

Crawly looked at the young king, clapping to the rhythm of the dancing girl, smiling at some private joke as the man beside him at the table spoke something into his ear. Crawly said, “That boy wants to rule the world.”

“Yes, I know.”

“That’s a bad idea for the world, angel.”

“Is it?”

“Of course it is.”

“But he’s…” Aziraphale chewed on his lip. “He’s awfully nice.”

“Well, I’ve only been here half a day, but he seems all right, yeah.”

“So why would your side want him to rule the world?”

“All that matters to my side,” said Crawly, “is that he might actually manage it. Doesn’t matter who it is. It’s always bad.”

But Aziraphale, still looking up at the table, said ruminatively, “Are you sure? He really does _like_ people, you know. That’s why he wants to bring them together, all under one joint kingdom. He likes the people here, you see, as much as he likes the ones in Macedon, and he wants them to like each other, too. It seems to be very easy for him, to love widely. A little like an angel, in that respect.”

Crawly raised his eyebrows. “That why you’re so keen on him?”

“Everybody is,” said Aziraphale, looking rather quickly back at Crawly. “You can feel it, can’t you? There’s a great deal of love in this camp.”

Aziraphale had asked Crawly a similar question on the wall in Eden, the very first time they’d met, looking out over the tracks that Adam and Eve were leaving in the sand. _You can feel it, can’t you? They do love one another. I hope that means they’ll be all right._ Aziraphale, an angel, had meant the question quite literally: built of God’s love, he could feel even the tiny human version of it reflected back at him in the air. Back then, Crawly had been young enough to remember what that had felt like— although in his day, of course, there had been no humans involved. Only the eternal love of the Almighty, a constant chime in the air, refracted back and forth by other angels. Which got a bit much sometimes, actually.

But since the big jump, things had been different. _Not really_ , Crawly had replied, back then, and shrugged. Aziraphale had looked surprised, and then rather sad. But perhaps today he had forgotten. Clearly he was a little distracted.

“Yeah, well,” Crawly said. “He likes you, too, tell you that for nothing.”

Aziraphale seemed to catch something in his tone, and paused. “I’m an angel. People do.”

“Him especially.”

“Well, as I say, liking comes to him easily.”

“As it does to you.”

“Yes,” said Aziraphale, slowly. “I love all that God has made equally, of course.”

“Wouldn’t dream of implying otherwise. Not that I’d know anything about that, being a demon and all.”

“I’m not sure _what_ you’re implying,” said Aziraphale, his eyebrows raised. “I am currently to all intents and purposes a eunuch, you may remember.”

“Yes, and I do actually know what a eunuch is. Wouldn’t necessarily get in the way of things if you were,” said Crawly. “Though, I don’t know, maybe you don’t… do that sort of thing, anyway.”

There was a pause, and then Aziraphale said, “I think that’s rather my business, isn’t it?”, somewhat more archly than Crawly had expected.

They looked at one another, and Crawly remembered why it was that these odd little meetings lodged so firmly under his skin, in between his ribs, during the long centuries that separated them. There was always a moment like this, where it was as if they both looked down into the vast, open chasm just beneath the surface of their conversation, an unsounded well of shared understanding. There was very little subtlety in Hell, and likely even less of it in Heaven, but there was a surprising reserve of it in Aziraphale, who often didn’t say quite what he meant and didn’t mean quite what he said, which was, Crawly thought, rather pleasingly human. But in amongst their familiar back-and-forth, Crawly also sometimes thought, _No, he’s listening, and he can hear me_. In some ways, perhaps, if not others.

Aziraphale could feel whatever it was that bound Adam to Eve, even as they became dark specks on the horizon. He could feel the rough-hewn devotion of a camp full of soldiers to their leader. He must— Crawly had often realised, a tight little twist of embarrassment in his stomach— feel whatever it was that lit up Crawly from the inside when the two of them stood beside one another. Perhaps it was tactful of Aziraphale not to mention it. Perhaps he had better options.

“Anyway,” Crawly shrugged, “Just saying. Option’s there. Might help get your point across.”

“Well,” said Aziraphale, evenly, “I’ll bear that in mind.”

Crawly quirked the corner of his mouth upwards. “Good. Since we’re on the same side, and all.”

“No, we’re not,” said Aziraphale, but without much rancour.

“You want the army of Macedon to march onward across the Indus, I want the army of Macedon to march onward across the Indus. Tale as old as time. So we sort of are.”

“Hmm,” said Aziraphale.

The girl, too, had finished dancing. Aziraphale clapped politely, and Crawly let his eyes flicker over the side of his face. Maybe he should go north, into Sogdiana, Scythia. Find some trouble to stir up. It wouldn’t be safe or sensible, really, hanging around here, looking at the side of someone’s face, letting too much air get to that unquenchable little flame.

“Right, then,” said Crawly. “I suppose I’ll be heading off again. Leave all this in your capable hands.”

“Oh,” said Aziraphale, looking disappointed. “Surely not. You only just got here.”

“No point in us both doing the same job, is there? And anyway, you know me. I’ve got plenty of other people’s lives to ruin.”

“I think ruining my life is putting it a bit strongly, Crawly.”

“That wasn’t what I meant,” said Crawly, smiling.

“Oh. Of course.”

“Anyway, I mean it. He really does like you,” said Crawly. And quite right too. “I think you’ll do just fine without me, angel.”

“Thank you,” said Aziraphale, unexpectedly. Crawly’s useless human heart seemed to stutter. Then Aziraphale cleared his throat, and said, “And you’re right, yes, that’s probably sensible. Crossing paths is one thing, but it wouldn’t do to spend too much time with each other, I suppose, would it? We couldn’t very well set up in the same place for too long. I don’t think my side would like that very much, if they noticed. Might put a proper rule in place about never speaking to each other again, or something. And that would be a terrible shame.”

“Yeah,” said Crawly. “Can’t imagine my lot would love it, either, if they got wind.”

“But surely you’ll stay tonight, though, before you go?” Aziraphale said. “You’ve come all this way. This feast won’t break up until daylight. You can always leave in the morning.”

Crawly, who would have done far more for far less, said, “Well, if you insist.”

**1448, Mainz**

“All right then,” said Crowley, leaning back in his chair and cracking his knuckles behind his head, “what’ve you got?”

Aziraphale, who was still dabbing at his mouth with a cloth, glanced reflexively behind him. “Do keep it down,” he murmured.

“For whose benefit?” Crowley asked, casting his eyes over the rest of the inn, which remained resolutely uninterested in either of them.

“The Almighty is technically omnipresent, you know.”

“Well, if that’s true, She already knows about this then, doesn’t She? And it doesn’t seem to have bothered her very much so far.”

Aziraphale sighed, and put the cloth down beside his empty plate of stew. “I just think it doesn’t hurt to be discreet.”

“Fine,” said Crowley, and leaned in a little, across the table, so that he could lower his voice. Aziraphale, too, leaned in: he smelled, as usual, of something clean and fresh, grass and running water, cutting through the tavern’s miasma of beef and beer and the coal-stoked fire. Crowley swallowed. “Right, well, I’ll start. I’ve got a bit of a backlog of unrest I’m supposed to be causing in Ghent, which I keep putting off.”

“Not much help there, I’m afraid. I’m in the west of France for most of the next few months. A whole raft of holy visions to facilitate.”

Crowley nodded. “All right. What about England? I’ve got something in Devon, actually, bit time-sensitive.”

“Oh, I’ve got a monastery to bless in Hampshire, so I’m sure I could go on to Devon. Not terribly out of the way.”

“That would save an awful lot of back and forth,” said Crowley, hopefully.

Aziraphale pushed his plate and cloth to one side. “What’s in Devon?”

“Nothing too complicated. A Justice of the Peace needs to fall in love with a local wise woman.”

“Well, I don’t mind looking after that,” said Aziraphale. “It doesn’t sound terribly like the machinations of evil, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Not until she realises what she can do when she has a Justice of the Peace hanging on her every word.”

“Hmm. I suppose I’m better off not knowing the consequences.”

“Of course you are,” said Crowley. “Well, I’ll owe you one. Sure you don’t have anything on the continent I can pick up?”

“Not at the moment, no.” Aziraphale shifted comfortably in his chair, and brushed a stray crumb of bread from his cuff. “Did you say there’s a time limit on Devon?”

“Ah, yes. Sort of needs to happen in the next couple of weeks. The woman’s going to leave town otherwise. You’d need to head off…” Crowley drained the end of his glass, imagining Aziraphale’s rather stately and presumably unhurried approach to long-distance travel. “Well, tomorrow, probably. Is that all right?”

“Yes,” said Aziraphale, slowly. “It should be. There are one or two things I meant to attend to here, but…”

“Well, why don’t I cover whatever you’ve got left over? Then we’re square. What’ve you got? Blessing? Healing? Religious ecstasy?”

Aziraphale cleared his throat. “It’s actually more of a personal interest, not exactly…” He pointed a finger discreetly upwards.

“Oh?” said Crowley, leaning even further forward, immediately intrigued. “Angel, do you have a side hustle?”

“No! Well, it’s not _not_ — ” Aziraphale said, repeating the pointing-upwards gesture. “I’m sure my side would approve, of course. It’s just not something that I’ve been specifically asked to do.”

“And that is?”

“Well, I’ve been in conversation with a terribly interesting man over the last few days. He’s got some remarkable ideas about a new sort of printing press.”

“Oh, I see,” said Crowley. “And?”

“I think he’s very nearly there. He just needs a little divine inspiration to make the thing a reality. Or, I suppose,” mused Aziraphale, “any sort of inspiration. But when it’s up and running, it’ll work miracles. You could copy out a whole book in less than a day!”

“Sure,” said Crowley, nodding contemplatively. “That’s a very clever idea.”

“I think it could really take off,” said Aziraphale, eagerly. “Imagine— there are books that one has to travel weeks or months to see today, but with this… you could have copies and copies, all over the country. All over the _world_. Plato, Plutarch, Homer. Dear old Sappho. And the Bible, of course. Anybody could read them.”

“Oh, I’m sure not everyone will like that,” said Crowley. “I’m pretty sure I could pick this one up above board, angel, spin it downstairs as the unchecked spread of dangerous knowledge. Consider it done.”

Aziraphale’s face creased into a warm, grateful smile that made Crowley’s breath catch in his throat. “Oh, thank you.”

“Well, just tit for tat, isn’t it,” said Crowley, adjusting his glasses. “Anyway. Anything else?”

“Not from me,” said Aziraphale. “I think we’re done.”

“Another round, in that case?”

“Don’t tempt me,” said Aziraphale.

Aziraphale didn’t need tempting to do most things, let alone to drink. But there was something in the pretence of it, the old shared dance, that Crowley thought they probably both found it comfortable to fall back on. They met, now, more often by design than by accident. Crowley expected that Aziraphale sometimes liked to pretend that he had been most cleverly tricked into doing so; and Crowley liked to pretend that Aziraphale could not feel the little burst of something in his heart whenever Aziraphale, looking furtive and expectant, arrived exactly on time.

It would be Crowley’s ruin, the fact that Aziraphale genuinely seemed to like him. It was nothing special: Aziraphale liked everything. Well, not exactly. He loved everything, as he had often explained, which was different. But he liked Crowley, too. It was there in pleased lift of his voice when they said hello after decades or centuries apart, and in the sparkle of amusement in his eyes that made Crowley weak with the desire to put it there. But then again, Aziraphale also liked stray dogs, and bound books, and bread and dripping. It was just hard to remember that, sometimes, when Aziraphale smiled at Crowley like he’d switched on a light.

It was several jugs later that Aziraphale, who had become rather pink-cheeked, said, “Listen, I— no, don’t pour me another— no, if I’m going _tomorrow_ , thank you very much, I’d better call it a night.”

“Ah, suit yourself,” said Crowley, and poured the rest of the jug into his own glass with a very discreet hiccough. But then he remembered: “Hey, angel, I’ve got a room upstairs. Long journey in the morning, nothing beats a nap beforehand— no, I know you don’t _need_ it, but you don’t need _this_ , either— ” Crowley reached over and emptied half of his over-full glass into Aziraphale’s “ —but this way you can have both, hmm?”

“You’re a dreadfully wily adversary,” mumbled Aziraphale, and then drank the wine. “Yes. All right, that sounds very nice.”

Upstairs, the room wasn’t so much very nice as absolutely passable, but no matter. Crowley lit the lamps on the wall with a touch of his finger, kicked off his shoes, and slumped into the chair in the corner.

“You remember how?” he said to Aziraphale, nodding towards the bed.

“I do,” said Aziraphale, slightly over-confidently.

“Great. Knock yourself out. Literally.”

Aziraphale looked back and forth between Crowley and the bed with the careful, slow regard of the not entirely sober. “But I’m taking your bed,” he said. “You can’t very well sleep in the chair.”

“Nah,” said Crowley, waving a hand, “I can stay up. I’m not headed off for a few days, am I, if I’m hanging out with your letters man, so I’ll be grand.”

“That’s very… kind of you,” said Aziraphale, gazing at him.

“Don’t say that,” said Crowley, but without much heat. He was warm and well-soused and, he supposed, quite happy. It was pleasing, to do something for the angel’s benefit. He would rather not have to keep thinking about why.

Aziraphale, now sitting on the edge of the bed, was unlacing his boots. He eased them off his feet, revealing the improbably unblemished cream-coloured hose beneath. Crowley was blinking vaguely at the sight of them, glad of his glasses, when Aziraphale said, “You know, Crowley, I’m glad we were able to reach an accord.”

“Huh,” said Crowley. “Yeah. Me too.”

“We do have mutual interests, I think,” Aziraphale said. He sounded painfully, studiedly casual, and he was looking at his boots, placing them carefully at the end of the bed. “You said that, once. Do you remember?”

Crowley couldn’t very well forget. He’d replayed the conversation in that warm little riverside shack several times, talking himself into and out of the idea that Aziraphale could have thought Crowley was suggesting a different arrangement entirely— and, unbelievably, had been about to say yes nonetheless. He’d been drunk, of course; they both had been. But then again, when were they not? In hindsight, the whole thing seemed a little like an improbable dream. But it seemed Aziraphale remembered it too.

“Yeah,” Crowley said, again, carefully.

“Anyway,” said Aziraphale. “I’m glad that we still do.” Then he pulled his legs up onto the bed, and lay for a moment looking up at the ceiling.

Crowley didn’t know quite what Aziraphale was playing at, but whatever it was, it was making his heart race. He dug his nails into his palm. “Do you want the lights off?” he managed.

“Actually,” said Aziraphale, turning to look at him, “I’m not sure I do remember how to do this. Sleep, I mean. Could you remind me?”

Crowley stared at him. This was not, he was fairly certain, what Aziraphale was actually asking for. And then it fell into place. Aziraphale had taken pity on him. Aziraphale, who must know that Crowley’s longing was burning a hole in his heart, was willing to let him exercise it; and not only that, but he had created a plausible little map for it to play out as if it were Crowley’s idea. An easy temptation. It was very careful and very clever, and Crowley ought to be mortified at such a show of mercy.

“Sure,” Crowley said, hearing his own voice come out with astonishing casualness. He pushed himself to his feet, and after a moment, removed his glasses, and left them on the chair. “Shift over. Let me show you.”

Aziraphale scooted his body a little way along the narrow bed, until he was nearly pressed to the wall. Crowley, breathless, lay down beside him, and steeled himself. _Don’t tempt me_ , which meant _Tempt me_. All right. This he could do.

“Turn over, angel,” he murmured, and Aziraphale rolled onto his side, so that they were facing one another. Crowley’s heart was hammering, but his gaze was sharp, his hands were steady. “I know another trick for sleeping,” he said. “Do you want to know what it is?”

Aziraphale’s eyes were wide open. He was close enough that Crowley could feel the thready trickle of his breath. “Yes,” he said, quietly.

Crowley reached forward, and touched two fingers gently to Aziraphale’s temple. “If you can’t settle things in here,” he said, and then he moved his hand to Aziraphale’s chest, over his rust-and-cream doublet. “Or in here. Then…” His hand drifted lower, not quite touching Aziraphale’s clothes, hovering somewhere over his hose-clad thigh.

“Yes?” said Aziraphale again, a little more urgently.

Keeping his eyes fixed on Aziraphale’s face, Crowley slid his hand under the trim of his doublet, until his fingers brushed the neat parcel underneath. Aziraphale inhaled sharply as Crowley spread his palm over him, felt the outline of a cock beneath his clothes. His pulse thundered in his wrist and his neck; Satan, he _wanted_ — but no. He was supposed to be tempting. He took his hand away again, and Aziraphale gasped, shifting his hips forward.

“You can release some tension,” Crowley murmured. He gave it a second. Two seconds. “Would you like me to…?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, in a rush, “Yes, yes, please, Crowley— ”

It was more than enough. Crowley slid his hand back under Aziraphale’s clothes, fumbled with the ties that held up his hose, miracled them open, and closed his hand around his cock, already stiffening. Aziraphale gasped again, and then pushed his head forward so that they were no longer looking one another in the eye, his forehead resting instead on Crowley’s shoulder.

If Crowley had thought he liked the idea of pleasing the angel— a night’s rest, the prospect of a mass-printed Bible, whatever— it was nothing compared to this. When Crowley wriggled the fingers of his hand, Aziraphale’s breath hitched, and when he began to smooth his palm along the growing length of him, Aziraphale shifted even closer. This actually made the angle of Crowley’s hand slightly more awkward, but he couldn’t bring himself to move even an inch backwards, away from Aziraphale. So instead he tightened his hand just a little, to make up for its cramped movement.

Aziraphale moaned, ever so quietly, and Crowley felt his own body shudder with arousal. He hadn’t imagined— well, he absolutely had imagined, and at length, and yet the effect that Aziraphale’s pleasure had on his own body was shocking in its immediacy. Crowley had done this sort of thing with enough humans, mostly out of intrigue and boredom, to have a thorough grasp of the anatomical side of it all. Even in the most casual of encounters he could understand the relationship between stimulus and reaction. But none of those encounters had been with Aziraphale; none of them had involved Crowley getting him rock hard in moments, and feeling every twitch of him in his hand; none of them had meant he could listen to the shallow panting of his breath in the hot space of air between their bodies. Crowley was on fire.

Aziraphale came with a a muffled groan into Crowley’s shoulder, which made Crowley feel as though his nervous system had been struck by lightning. For a moment Aziraphale stayed pressed exactly where he was, his breathing ragged and slowing, until Crowley said, quietly, “All right?”

“Mmph,” said Aziraphale, or something like it, into his shoulder, and then he raised his head. His face was flushed red, his eyes bright, his hair just a little fluffed out of place. He took a moment to compose himself, and then said, “Yes. Very.”

Crowley allowed himself the smallest of smiles. “So, did that work?”

Aziraphale smiled too, sudden and amused, the brightness of it almost making Crowley turn away. He huffed out a tiny breath of laughter. “I couldn’t say.”

“Reckon you’ll drop off any minute.”

But Aziraphale was, very gently, running his hand over the sleeve of Crowley’s doublet, blinking his hazy eyes back into focus. “Well,” he said, “I would have thought that before then… one ought to…”

“You don’t have to,” Crowley breathed, although as Aziraphale’s hand slipped downwards, other parts of his body were very, very adamant that he should. And then Aziraphale’s hand was finding its way into his clothes, beneath his doublet, unlacing the hose, and—

“Oh,” said Aziraphale, feeling carefully. “I see. I don’t— hmm.”

Crowley, fairly amused, said, “Not familiar with the plumbing?”

“Not exactly,” said Aziraphale, gamely. He had laid his hand gently over the curve between Crowley’s legs, but didn’t seem to be quite sure what to do next.

“Five and a half thousand years, and you’ve never once gone in for an upgrade?”

“Well,” said Aziraphale. “I’ve had a lot on.”

“You might like it, you know, if you did,” said Crowley, and snaked his own hand around Aziraphale’s wrist, pulling it carefully forwards. This pressed Aziraphale’s hand far more firmly against him, at which Crowley hissed between his teeth, and Aziraphale said, “ _Oh_ ,” in a low voice that Crowley wasn’t quite sure he’d heard him use before.

Aziraphale tried, for a while, to do something useful with his fingers, but the fumbling only sent strange, stray waves of sensation through Crowley’s increasingly desperate body. Still, the knowledge that it was Aziraphale whose brow was furrowed in concentration, that it was Aziraphale whose fingertip moved interestedly through the wetness between his legs, got Crowley part of the way there nonetheless. Eventually Crowley took a firmer hold of Aziraphale’s wrist and held it in place, and after a moment Aziraphale got the picture. He stilled his fingers, holding two of them in a stiff, thick curve that Crowley could rub against in slow circles. Eventually, hot and drowning in the sensation, Crowley allowed himself the final indignity of shaking apart against Aziraphale’s hand.

“Right,” said Crowley, once he could do so, his voice coming out slightly more cracked than he’d expected. Aziraphale had taken his hand back, and was looking with vague interest at his wet fingers, before wiping them on his hose. Crowley rolled abruptly onto his back. “So there we go. That’s happened.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale agreed. Crowley supposed that even Aziraphale, who could probably convince himself that black was white if he wanted to, would struggle to claim otherwise.

“Was it…” said Crowley. “Well. Mutually interesting?”

“I think so,” said Aziraphale’s voice, from by his side. “I mean. I hope so.”

“I thought it was,” said Crowley, quickly.

“Good. Me too.”

“Good.”

“I think it was inevitable, really,” said Aziraphale. “As you once said, you know, the two of us down here by ourselves. Or up here, as the case may be. There’s no reason we shouldn’t— do something we both enjoy. If it’s not interfering with our work, of course.”

“Of course,” said Crowley. He swallowed. Unless he was seriously mistaken, Aziraphale was suggesting that they might do this again. If Crowley knew anything at all about Aziraphale, he very rarely stopped a single taste of something he liked, and he seemed to have liked that, all right. Well, there they were. A mutually beneficial arrangement.

“You see,” said Aziraphale, “the wonderful thing is that, these days, I think we both understand each other perfectly.”

**1800, Soho**

Crowley pushed open the door of Aziraphale’s bookshop, which caused a little bell to tinkle, announcing his arrival.

Sweeping his hat off his head, Crowley had, for the first time, a chance to actually look around the place. It was bright and airy, gleaming with new paint and clean brass fittings. And, of course, there were shelves and shelves and shelves: empty, mostly, but piles of fat leather-bound books lay around the floor, waiting to be sorted. Crowley smiled. Alexandria in a nutshell.

“They gone, then?” Crowley asked.

Aziraphale, who was standing in the middle of the uncarpeted floor, didn’t answer him. He was holding a small, golden medal in one hand, hung on a ribbon, and was looking at it with an air of distraction.

“Oh, they let you keep that,” said Crowley. “How kind.”

Aziraphale seemed to shake out of his reverie. He looked up at Crowley with a small, uneasy crease in his brow, and then glanced quickly from side to side.

Crowley had managed very successfully to avoid running into any other angels on Earth for several hundred years now. It was always such a rigmarole. Either he had to pretend to be doing something far more dastardly than he was, to keep up appearances; or if he couldn’t be bothered, he just had to hide, which was embarrassing. But you could feel the other angels from a mile off, so it wasn’t too hard to make yourself scarce. Crowley had got so used to equating Heaven with Aziraphale: his bright clean smell, his warm light, the gentle curve of his smile. It was always a bit of a shock to remember that the others smelt so clean it turned harsh in his throat, a sort of chemical burn; and the light that came from them was white and blinding, painful to look at.

He’d never actually seen Aziraphale among other angels before. It had been very strange to see them all side by side when Crowley had arrived on the doorstep that morning, and stranger still to realise how obviously uncomfortable Aziraphale had been. Aziraphale, of course, had been on Earth for a very long time, which must knock some of the edges off. Perhaps he’d been just as stiff and starched as the others back in the old days, back in Eden, and Crowley had just forgotten it. He wondered if Gabriel and Sandalphon and the rest could tell the difference.

Aziraphale still seemed uncomfortable. Crowley followed the flicker of his eyes, lowered his voice, and muttered, “Are they still here?”

This time Aziraphale shook his head. “No. No, they’ve gone.”

“Phew,” said Crowley. “And they're not sending you…?” he jerked his thumb towards the skylight in the centre of the room.

“No, they’re not,” said Aziraphale, slowly. “How did you know?”

Crowley hung, for a moment, on the edge of the possibility of telling the truth. _I stopped them_. Aziraphale might even be pleased. Impressed. But then again— it was embarrassing, really, to have to admit it out loud. Aziraphale already knew the worst, must already know that the thought of Crowley spending the next six thousand years up here without him was absolutely untenable. No need to go on about it.

“I was listening outside,” he said.

“Of course,” said Aziraphale. “Well. That was all very fortunate.”

“I’ll say,” said Crowley. He still had the box of chocolates he’d picked up that morning, which, in the absence of a table, he balanced on top of a pile of books. “There you go, by the way, happy opening.”

“Oh,” said Aziraphale, his lip twitching. “Not until Friday, though, of course.”

“Well, I’m ahead of the curve. And I have to be in Ireland on Friday.” Crowley, who still viewed the whole St Patrick debacle as something of a personal slight, never missed an opportunity to pick up work in Ireland in retaliation.

“Sorry, yes, I remember,” said Aziraphale. He was still turning the medal over slightly distractedly in his hands. “How long will you be in Ireland?” he asked.

“Shouldn’t be more than a week, I reckon.”

“Crowley, do you wonder if— ” Aziraphale looked rather awkward, and not very happy, considering Crowley had assumed the whole no-more-forcible-promotion thing was going to be good news. “Maybe you should stay there longer? Maybe we shouldn’t both be in London at the same time. For a little while, at least.”

“Why’s that?”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Aziraphale, in a baffling, sudden rush of distress. “I’ve been so stupid.”

This was not something the angel admitted to lightly, or, in Crowley’s experience, at all. “What do you mean?” he asked, suspiciously.

“If we were to be caught… fraternising,” said Aziraphale, looking miserable, “If anything were ever to happen to you because I’ve been, oh, selfish, and thoughtless, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. Don’t you see?”

“Selfish,” said Crowley, uncomprehending. He wasn’t sure he did see. “Well, then, let’s carry on not getting caught. Been going all right so far.”

Aziraphale was worrying at his bottom lip. “Upstairs are well aware that this is to be my base of operations, now, of course.”

Crowley nodded. “Yeah. Well. Probably be hard to keep that a secret.”

“So they’ll be coming back to check in, now that they know where to find me. Who knows when, and who knows how often. And if they ever found you here too… I don’t know what would happen. But I can’t imagine it would be good.”

“Probably something unpleasantly Good,” Crowley mused.

“I’ve been— we’ve been very careless, of late. It’s a miracle we haven’t got into any real trouble yet. And perhaps we ought to be far more careful, before we do.”

“All right,” said Crowley. It was, perhaps, also a miracle that nothing had happened before now to give Aziraphale’s instinct for avoiding trouble a good shake. “What sort of careful?”

“Well,” said Aziraphale, “Like I said, maybe we should try not to be in the same place quite as often as we have been, recently.”

“Hard to do much thwarting that way,” Crowley pointed out.

Aziraphale paused. “Yes, I— yes. Of course there’s reason enough for us to cross paths now and again. That would look above board, I expect. But, oh, listen, Crowley. I don’t think you should come back to the shop again. If Gabriel could drop in at any moment…”

Crowley admitted to himself that this did seem fairly sensible. He glanced again around the bookshop, its half-unpacked boxes and mismatched furnishings, already somehow exactly the sort of ordered chaos that Aziraphale liked. He’d rather liked the idea of coming to visit, of knowing himself where Aziraphale was most likely to be. Circling this funny little place like a bit of territory. But Aziraphale was making sense.

“Yes, all right,” Crowley said. “Not here. Got it.”

But Aziraphale, rather than looking pleased at the accord, had dropped his gaze to the floor. He set his mouth into a wobbly line, and then looked back up again. “I also think,” he said, “that we may have been spending too much time together, these last few decades. Dangerously so. For the last few centuries, probably. And that perhaps we should make an effort to spend… less.”

Crowley, who had a sudden and horrible feeling that he knew exactly where this was going, said, “Define less.”

“Well, we should keep in touch, of course. It would be silly not to. And we could establish some safe places to meet, if it’s necessary. Public places, I should think. Easy to explain why we’re both there, if we ever ran into anyone else from…” Aziraphale glanced up, and then down. “Either side.”

“Public,” repeated Crowley. And then, just to make sure he hadn’t got the wrong end of this rather unpleasant stick, “You don’t want to meet privately.”

“No,” said Aziraphale, quietly. “I think that we— would be putting ourselves in unnecessary danger. And I’ve been letting myself pretend we’re not, because…” He looked deflated in a way that made Crowley’s tired heart ache. “Because I’ve been rather selfish. As I said.”

Selfish, Crowley thought again, blankly. There had been plenty of benefit to Aziraphale in this little arrangement, of course. He had always liked things that made him feel good, and Crowley had had the time and inclination to turn making Aziraphale feel good into something of an art. Aziraphale had enjoyed learning to please Crowley, too; he was visibly proud of his curated little reserve of skills, of his ability to take Crowley apart whenever he pleased. Not that it took much.

But while Crowley had become something Aziraphale allowed himself to want, he was far from something Aziraphale might _need_. For Aziraphale, this had been a welcome pleasure, an indulgence, but nothing like contending with an ancient, desperate well of desire, gnawing somewhere at the centre of himself. And Crowley also supposed that Aziraphale still saw it as a kindness. A way of taking pity on Crowley’s own ungovernable, unforgivable need, blaring out as it must do at such distracting volume. He expected it really did hurt Aziraphale, to have to cut an act of kindness short.

“Right, then,” said Crowley. “Understood. Not a problem.”

“Oh,” said Aziraphale. “Well. That’s good.”

They looked at one another across the room, Aziraphale’s medal still clutched in his hands, Crowley’s hat still in his. It was easy as all that, then.

Crowley fitted his hat back onto his head, and said, “Well, I’ll be off, in that case. Plenty of people’s days to make a bit worse. You know how it is.”

“Yes, of course,” said Aziraphale. He slipped the medal into the pocket of his trousers. “And then, when you’re back in a couple of weeks, we should— find somewhere safe to run into one another. Go over the new terms of operation.”

“Public, you said?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Outdoors? Can’t get more public than that. What about St James’s Park?”

“That would be perfect. Saturday after next? Will you be back by then?” Crowley nodded. “Well, let’s say three o’clock?”

“Three o’clock,” repeated Crowley.

“I’ll be walking around the lake.”

“Sounds lovely,” said Crowley. “Well, good luck with…” he waved a hand around the shop. “All of this. Very you.”

“Thank you,” Aziraphale said, and smiled, faintly.

Crowley tried not to keep the image of it in his mind as he turned around and walked out of the door, making sure to put some swagger into it. The bell rang on his way out.

**1929, Berlin**

Crowley lit a cigarette, slid it into one corner of his mouth, and leaned back on his elbows against the bar. People were chatting by his side, but he peered towards the stage, just a roughly-erected wooden platform at one end of the dingy room, where a boy dressed as a girl was singing.

Crowley had been in town for a few years now, and had been avoiding work with a level of success not reached since the high days of the Arrangement. He’d privately decided that he was probably due a holiday. He also had some idea that creeping around the city’s spirit-soaked underbelly would be enough of a defence if anyone downstairs got it into their heads to pay him a visit. “Yeah,” he’d shrug, waving a hand vaguely around wherever they stumbled across him. “Sin?” And downstairs, who tended to be rather uncritical of these things, would probably agree, and, Satan willing, leave him in peace.

The voice of the boy on stage was not at all beautiful, but it was, Crowley thought, rather arresting. He squinted behind his glasses and paid some vague attention. Perhaps it wasn’t a boy at all, but a woman in a boyish sort of body. Crowley pulled the cigarette out of his mouth, drained the last of his glass of whisky, and slotted it back in again.

The boy beside Crowley, who had been laughing at a joke Crowley hadn’t been listening to, nudged him gently in the ribs. “Hey,” he said, grinning. “Da schaut jemand zu dir rüber.”

This wasn’t unusual. Crowley had also long been aware that, even while steadfastly evading actual work, he could technically get a few temptations in by hanging around anywhere with people and looking a particular combination of available but aloof. His shirt was open at the collar, his trousers well-fitted, a little eyeliner smudged for effect. He did have standards.

Rolling his eyes, Crowley followed the direction of the boy’s glance. On the far side of the room, staring straight at him, hat in hand, was Aziraphale.

It was possible that Crowley’s heart stopped, briefly, but luckily this had no adverse effect. Aziraphale looked— oh, like he always did. Like a little beam of light had crept through some crack in the dank ceiling to illuminate him, pale and inordinately beautiful. He was in a neat, pressed linen suit, and the hand that wasn’t clutching his hat held a small travelling-bag, and he looked acutely, indefinably English. Crowley wondered when, exactly, Aziraphale had begun to merge his understanding of himself with that particularly odd section of a particularly odd little island. Aziraphale had been there pretty exclusively for some time, Crowley supposed, at least since he’d had the bookshop. But, really, it must have been longer ago than that, to have decided upon the bookshop in the first place. What a funny thing to have done.

“Engländer,” said the boy next to Crowley, sagely, in case this needed corroboration. His name was Otto, and he was almost certainly going to Hell, which Crowley meant as a compliment. “Ah, wie du.”

Crowley frowned. “Ich bin kein Engländer,” he said.

“Warum bist du dann so verklemmt?” asked Otto, rolling his eyes, but Crowley had stopped listening. Aziraphale had looked away from him. He glanced at his bag, and then at the door behind him, and Crowley thought for a moment that he might simply turn and leave. But then, after a pause, Aziraphale began slowly to make his way through the press of people, in the direction of the bar.

“Du hast Glück,” said Otto, cheerfully. “Schau dir seine Klamotten an. Er hat Geld.”

“Doubt it,” Crowley murmured, mainly to himself. But Aziraphale, as he threaded his way cautiously across the room, was drawing some attention. He looked rich, English and fresh off the train— all of which, if Crowley had been in the mood for it, would have been quite funny— and, for once, a good number of the eyes in the room were trained appraisingly on him. Crowley licked his lips, ran his eyes over the faces of the people who were watching Aziraphale. He wondered what the hot feeling in the pit of his stomach meant; it wasn’t, he thought, entirely jealousy. In a way, Crowley supposed, he rather liked it.

Aziraphale, once he reached the bar, seemed to falter. He was a few steps away, and he glanced at the grubby bar-top, at his own fingernails, and then back at Crowley, who hadn’t stopped watching him. They looked at one another, and Crowley thought, _Well, I’m not going to go first._

Sighing, Otto slipped around from the other side of Crowley, and extended his hand to Aziraphale. “Hello,” he said, in rote-practised English. “Pleased to meet you. My name is Otto.”

Aziraphale blinked, and shook Otto’s hand. “Good evening,” he said.

“Please meet my friend,” Otto said, and then, turning to Crowley again and catching his expression, he paused. He looked back at Aziraphale, and then back at Crowley, and said, “But do you know each other already?” His eyes narrowed, intrigued. “You are already friends?”

“No,” Crowley said, wondering, as he did, whether he meant it to be a punishment or a kindness. “We’re not friends.” Whichever Aziraphale assumed it to be, he hid it well. After a moment, Crowley held out his hand, and Aziraphale took it.

Seemingly realising he was going to have to go through the rather bizarre process of introducing himself, Aziraphale cleared his throat and said, “My name is Fell.”

“Crowley,” said Crowley. “Charmed, I’m sure.”

“And both of you with no Christian name,” said Otto, grinning. “This isn’t your English boarding school. I see you have one,” he said, pointing at the bag in Aziraphale’s hand, which was stamped _A. Z. Fell_. “We are friends now, so you can tell us.”

Aziraphale looked at the bag, at Otto, at Crowley again, and seemed to come to the conclusion that making something up would be easier than any other kind of explanation. He looked, considering, back at the bag. “Anthony,” he said.

“Nice name,” Otto said. “Crowley, now, he has no Christian name. He says the Christians would not want him to have one. Funny man. But then again, Crowley is often drunk, hm?”

“Could be drunker,” Crowley said.

Aziraphale said, “What will you drink?”

It had been nearly seventy years since he’d seen Aziraphale. Not long, in the grand scheme of things, but it felt like far longer. Crowley had found the drift towards stilted, stifled professionalism in the early nineteenth century harder to stomach than he’d expected, and Aziraphale’s inexplicable refusal to help him get hold of a bit of holy water for sensible insurance purposes had been a frustration too many. _I don’t need you_ , he’d bitten out, an obvious and rather dramatic nonsense, and tried not to think too much about Aziraphale’s not particularly kind reply. He’d decided to treat this unfortunate incident as a clean, cold blade, an excuse to stop himself trailing pathetically on the end of Aziraphale’s increasingly long string. And so, for the first time in over a millennium, they had genuinely lost touch with one another.

He had looked for Aziraphale only once, not long after the beginning of what humans, with their blessedly short memories, referred to as the Great War. Although Crowley, with his inescapably long memory, had been rudely surprised by the sheer scale of it nonetheless, which was indeed great. Not to mention the inhumanly rapid development of machine guns and tanks and shells to go along with it.

Crowley had heard nothing from downstairs, but he’d still worried that the big one might be on the way, and thought he’d better give Aziraphale a tip-off. And even if it wasn’t, if this was all human, he had half a speech in his head, unpolished. They’ve really fucked up here, angel. Let’s go off somewhere. Sit this out together, not get involved. But the bookshop, when he trailed past it, was closed up, and he was told it had been for some time.

Assuming that Aziraphale must have got it into his head to go to France— driving an ambulance, or re-setting horses’ broken legs, or some such ineffectual nonsense— Crowley had gone instead to the front. He walked across miles and miles of wasteland, death-scars driven across the earth, wandering in and out of both sides of the lines. At first he remembered to miracle changes of uniform, but after a while his clothes became smeared enough with mud and blood and shit that it didn’t really matter. He lost and broke several pairs of glasses, but people assumed his eyes had something to do with gas. Nobody paid much attention to him anyway, moving quiet and dirty among them, apart from the shivering boys he found when he skidded unexpectedly into shell-holes, begging him to end it. For them he would light a last cigarette, a blank-faced, yellow-eyed angel of death, and many of them would thank him.

He would have had orders, surely, he kept reminding himself, if it really was the end of the world. They wouldn’t have forgotten about him. Every time a mine went off and the earth shook itself apart, he squinted for Hastur or Beelzebub crawling from the crater, but saw nothing.

Crowley had walked until the smell of cordite made him sick, until he was so permanently wet through and freezing that he couldn’t shake it, even though he ought to be able to have miracled himself dry; but he never once felt the pull of warmth that meant Aziraphale was nearby. Well, good. He didn’t belong there. But Crowley had often wished he were.

He had walked his way out of France and into Germany, and kept on walking. He had, after it was all over, accepted the commendation he received from downstairs.

Apologies and amendment-making had taken a back seat, for a few mud-streaked years. The Apocalypse had seemed imminent, and little else had mattered. But there had been another lonely, slightly bitter decade and a half since then. Crowley was no longer sure which of them owed what to each other, but he had a sense he was owed something.

He got a drink from Aziraphale, at least, who stood them both whisky, and beer for Otto. They stayed by the bar and drank and watched the singer, while Aziraphale’s hands fidgeted on the rim of his glass and the brim of his hat. Crowley wondered if this was a coincidence, like the old days. Perhaps Aziraphale had fancied a jaunt to the continent, and had just happened to descend the very stairs that would find Crowley at the bottom. Or, perhaps, he too had been looking.

Crowley drank quickly. What a profoundly odd thing they had both done, to pretend not to know one another. But then again, it was hard to admit to knowing someone better than anyone else on Earth could know any other being. His heart, as ever, beat out its tattoo of long-buried longing, and Crowley knew Aziraphale could hear it.

“It is your first time here, no?” Otto asked Aziraphale.

“Not exactly,” Aziraphale said. “I’ve been to Berlin before.”

“But not to this bar.”

“I don’t believe it was open when I last visited.”

Otto flicked his eyes between Aziraphale and Crowley, and asked, smiling, “And you like it here?”

“It’s very jolly,” Aziraphale said.

Crowley, heart aside, remained confusedly, mutinously silent until the singer’s turn was finished, and there was a warm scattering of applause. Otto, smirking, slipped away— ostensibly to speak to the singer, although Crowley was fairly sure they didn’t know each other. Then again, you could get to know anyone in here fast enough, if you wanted to.

“Well,” said Aziraphale, to his hat. “They’re having fun here, aren’t they?”

“Don’t they deserve to, after the last shitshow?” Crowley said, to his drink.

“Yes, I’d have thought so,” Aziraphale said, quietly. He was watching Otto kiss the singer rather delicately on the back of their outstretched hand. Crowley swallowed, and cricked his neck, and waited, tense, for them to be forced to breach this unbreachable-seeming gap. But then Aziraphale said, “Your friend thinks I’m picking you up, you know.”

Crowley looked up, and Aziraphale was looking at him too. He threw back the last of his drink, and said, “And are you?”

Aziraphale didn’t answer immediately. Instead, after a moment, he drew a slim silver case from an inside pocket of his jacket, and said, “Cigarette?”

This was, Crowley supposed, an answer in itself, and a surprisingly astute one. He wondered, in a sudden, sharp rush, what Aziraphale had been doing for the last seventy years. Crowley, after all, had picked up the habit from Aziraphale somewhere in the middle of the last century. It was useful to have something to offer him on a street corner, or by the Serpentine.

Crowley nodded, and watched Aziraphale draw out two cigarettes. Glancing briefly around the room— nobody was looking— Crowley touched his finger to his tongue, sparking the tiniest flare of heat, and then touched his fingertip to the end of one of the two cylinders. He plucked the cigarette carefully from Aziraphale’s fingers, put it into his mouth, and used it to light the second one. He handed this to Aziraphale, who was looking at him as if he might eat him, here, whole. Crowley felt his blood heat. If he couldn’t have an answer to the awful, pathetic vastness of what Aziraphale made him feel, he could still at least drive him mad.

Aziraphale took a single drag of his cigarette, and then said, voice rather tight, “I need some air.”

This was obviously in every sense untrue, but Crowley nodded, and followed him to the door.

They went through the curtain, and along a short, narrow passageway, turning sideways to pass by the people coming in. Aziraphale’s shoes scuffed against the stone steps as he climbed up out of the basement into the night, and Crowley followed him still. Out into the dark little backstreet, the club unmarked by sign or light. You had to know your way here. Crowley wondered how Aziraphale knew it, or who had told him.

He followed Aziraphale along the street and around the corner, where there was a railway bridge. Their cigarettes were two points of light in the dark underneath it, until Crowley flicked his away into the dirt. As if he had been waiting for a cue, Aziraphale dropped his too, and put his bag down on the ground. Even if Crowley hadn’t been able to see in the darkness, he could still have felt Aziraphale’s presence with every other heightened, straining sense his desperate corporation possessed.

Crowley knew that Aziraphale was about to kiss him, although he was a little surprised by the force of it. Aziraphale had the lapels of Crowley’s shirt in his fists, and he pressed Crowley backwards into the wall of the bridge, and then kissed him hard on the mouth, so that Crowley was held between him and the cold, damp brick at his back. He paused, for a second, to pull Crowley’s glasses off his face, and drop them on the ground, which Crowley let him do.

It became a quick, frantic scrabble. Crowley shoved his hands under Aziraphale’s jacket, tore his shirt out of his neatly-tucked belt, his still-hot fingertips brushing the inordinately cool skin of Aziraphale’s midriff. But Aziraphale’s waistcoat was still buttoned, and so the shirt wouldn’t come up further than an inch or so. Crowley growled and ripped the bottom few buttons open. But Aziraphale, who had continued to kiss him, his hands still knotted in the front of his shirt, stepped backwards.

Crowley gave a little gasp of frustration; but Aziraphale, blinking in the dark, was going to his knees. And there, with his good linen trousers on the filthy ground, he opened Crowley’s flies, pushed his hips against the wall with awful strength, and put Crowley’s cock in his mouth.

Crowley hadn’t been alone, these last seventy years. By this he meant he had been dreadfully, indescribably alone, a feeling so shocking in its enormity that he hadn’t quite been able to comprehend it, but he had, at least, been fucking people. More, probably, than over the rest of the last six millennia combined. Here in Berlin, too, it was ever so easy. He didn’t even have to try. Harder work to avoid it, really. But he remembered, as Aziraphale’s tongue made him almost crumble with white-hot shock, that being touched by Aziraphale was like nothing else on this earth, quite literally. He had thought he could survive without it, if he only had Aziraphale’s company; he had thought he could survive without Aziraphale’s company, if he had a whole world full of people still to play with. But having become accustomed to both, he had found the loss of each in turn to be like some part of himself being ripped away. Here, for a moment, with grime in his wall-turned palms and a train thundering overhead, Crowley remembered what it was to be whole.

Aziraphale sucked his cock until Crowley thought he might cry, and then, when he was moments from finishing, he stopped. He stood again, his eyes light in the darkness, and leaned in to kiss Crowley once more. Crowley sank into it, his prick standing red and bare and angry between them, and tasted whisky, smoke, sex, and the crackle of electricity.

Aziraphale groaned, muffled, into his mouth. And then he was thumbing his own flies open, pushing his own hard cock against Crowley’s, and pulling at them both together. His other hand was fisted in Crowley’s hair.

“I love you,” Crowley said, choking, against Aziraphale’s mouth, and then he came, and so did Aziraphale.

Aziraphale had gone very still, and his head had dropped against Crowley’s shoulder. “Please,” he murmured, into Crowley’s neck, as he let them both go. “Please don’t say that. Please, you know that I— ”

“Yeah,” Crowley said, barely above a breath, staring up at the sweeping curve of the bridge’s underside. “Yeah. Sorry.”

When Crowley looked at Aziraphale again, he had taken a couple of steps away, and had re-buttoned his flies and waistcoat. He was wiping his hand on a handkerchief, which he folded neatly and slipped into a pocket inside his jacket. Feeling Crowley’s eyes on him, he looked up; and then, after a moment, he reached down into the dirt, and picked up Crowley’s glasses, which he handed to him. Silently, Crowley put them on.

“I think this may have been a bad idea,” said Aziraphale, quietly.

Crowley wondered exactly how much of the last six thousand years he was referring to. “Yeah, probably,” he agreed.

Aziraphale picked up his bag. “I’m awfully sorry too,” he said. Then he left.

**The present day, Soho**

“Oh,” said Crowley, “I think you’ve made it abundantly clear what you don’t want to hear.”

Aziraphale, who was stood a few feet from him, seemed to double take. “What?” he said. “No, it’s only— I’ve never wanted you to say things you don’t mean.”

Coming from Aziraphale, this was rich. Crowley laughed, in astonishment more than anything.

Things had got better, over the last century, before they had got worse. Aziraphale did really seem to have missed him in the years they had spent apart, and after they had reconciled in the 40s, Aziraphale’s rules relaxed, a little. They had crept carefully back to an easiness that approached the good old days of the Arrangement. Crowley was even permitted to hang around the bookshop, on the understanding that they both stayed vigilant for the need for him to make himself miraculously scarce in an emergency. Gabriel hadn’t shown his face for decades, but Aziraphale remained relatively cautious, until, now and again, he wasn’t; and now and again they fucked, a quick and familiar puncture of satisfaction in an otherwise carefully calibrated relationship. It had become something, Crowley thought, a little out of both of their control, rather too easy for them both to slip back into at moments of stress or excitement or boredom. Aziraphale would become noticeably distant for a few months, afterwards, and then the whole process would begin again.

And then the Apocalypse really had come. And then it hadn’t.

“Well, then, there we go,” he said. “Why don’t we both just be honest with each other?” Aziraphale looked a little worried at this prospect, but Crowley pushed on regardless. “No more saying things we don’t mean. Only things we do. I know you can do that; you had some practice at it, last week.”

Aziraphale shook his head, looking unhappy. “No, I was— panicking, Crowley. I was frightened. I didn’t mean those things. Of course I like you. Of course we’re friends. I thought you must know.”

“Not that,” Crowley said, through gritted teeth. “I know that was bullshit. But you… when we thought it really might be all over. At the airbase, when Satan was on his way. You said that you would never speak to me again.”

In amongst the roaring, shattering, ash-flecked chaos of those moments before the Earth’s imminent destruction— the tremble of the rise of Satan in the pit of Crowley’s stomach, the awful despair of everything slipping from their fingers at the final hurdle— it had cut through Crowley’s attention like a blade. _Come up with something or I'll never speak to you again._ Oh, that had hurt. Even there, at the end of the world, a small and stinging reminder of Aziraphale’s pity.

Aziraphale blinked at him. “Oh. I mean. It’s all a bit of a blur, really. Not a terribly brilliant incentive, in hindsight, but, well. Panicking again.”

“Oh, come on, Aziraphale, don’t play thick.” Crowley was so very tired of it all. The indignity of all his years of helpless, fruitless loving, open and raw. Aziraphale, wavering, indulging him with angelic favour one moment, paranoid and distant the next, safe in the knowledge that Crowley would always be willing to capitulate, because what other choice did he have? “You threatened me with the worst thing you could think of,” he said, angry again, and relieved to grasp hold of it. “And you were right, obviously. You know it would destroy me; you know it nearly already had. You saw me, when I thought you were really gone. You _know_ how I feel. But now it’s all over, and it's like none of it ever happened. And we’re back to— _dear boy_.”

Crowley breathed out. Aziraphale was staring at him, mouth slightly open. They were both silent.

The rain was thudding heavily on the skylight above them, and if Crowley believed God gave any kind of a shit, which he didn’t, he might have thought She was doing it on purpose for effect. The only other sound was the quiet hiss of the gramophone. Aziraphale’s record had finished, and was waiting to be turned over, running round and round in its inner groove.

“You know,” said Aziraphale, eventually, “that I call you that because— you are very dear to me.”

Crowley closed his eyes. “You call everyone that. You just said.”

Aziraphale drew in an audible breath. “No,” he said. “With you, it’s different. I _like_ calling you that.”

Crowley opened his eyes again. Aziraphale looked wide-eyed and nervous but strangely, fiercely resolute, as he had at that same airbase, sword in hand.

“It _was_ the worst thing I could think of,” Aziraphale said. “For me, I mean. The idea of never speaking to you again.” He swallowed. “When you said that I know how you feel,” he continued, something in his voice that was both steel-tense and awfully soft, “what do you mean?”

Crowley sucked in a breath between his teeth. Aziraphale must know. He must. But he was the one who had said _honest_ , just now. “You’re an angel,” he forced himself to say. “You can sense it. You can feel— love.”

It hung in the air between them. Crowley fought the urge to slink away, leave it there, safely outside of him. But he stayed where he was.

And then Aziraphale said, very quietly, “How long?”

“Pardon?” said Crowley.

“How long have you— felt like this.”

“Ah.” Crowley rocked back on his heels, rubbing his hand over his chin. He had hoped he wouldn’t have to put it into words, which was, somehow, even more of an indignity. “I mean. Always. I don’t think I knew what it… was, to begin with. I don’t know if I would have used the word. But the first time we met, you made me…” This was awful, honesty. It was like being sick. He wished he’d never suggested it. “Happy. You always made me happy.”

Aziraphale swallowed. “The Garden. Is that what you’re saying?”

Crowley nodded, wretched.

Aziraphale drew in a sharp breath. Then, inexplicably, he said, “Crowley, for almost long as humans have lived, they’ve made music. It’s an impulse in them, I think, from the Almighty; it’s as if they can’t avoid it. And for as long as there has been music, there has been harmony. The very simplest harmony is the drone. It’s just one note, slow and steady and constant, behind everything else.”

Crowley frowned, still wretched, but now fairly confused into the bargain. “Right,” he said, not knowing what else to do.

“I didn’t know,” said Aziraphale. He looked shaken, and his voice was urgent. “You must believe me. I was still getting used to how things worked on Earth, the first time we met. Everything felt different, strange. There was love in the Garden, and love from then onwards, and I thought it must be— background noise. I could feel it everywhere, and I thought humans must be creating it. Because it never changed. Steady and constant.”

“Ah,” said Crowley, at length.

“But it was— ”

“Yeah.”

Aziraphale’s hands twitched, by his side. “I was told— I was always told that demons couldn’t love.”

“By whom?” said Crowley. Aziraphale glanced at the ceiling. “Well, I wouldn’t believe everything you hear, angel.”

“You said it yourself,” said Aziraphale, with just the slightest edge of familiar pique.

“Yeah, well, including from me,” said Crowley. “I’m not sure you ever got the hang of sarcasm.”

“Crowley,” said Aziraphale. “I’m so sorry. But _you_ must realise that I— Well. How I love you.”

“As you love all things,” said Crowley, half-automatically. But tentative.

“No,” said Aziraphale. “No, not at all like that, I’m afraid.”

Crowley’s heart leapt into his mouth. There was a bright white flash of light, cutting through the clouds above the skylight, just for a second. The crack and rumble of thunder followed it almost immediately. And then, to Crowley’s considerable surprise, a drop of water landed on the centre of the carpet between them. Then another drop. Then, faster and faster, a steady trickle of water began to fall, leaking in through the skylight. He and Aziraphale both stared at it, and then looked back at each other.

“Your ceiling’s leaking,” said Crowley, unnecessarily. “It shouldn’t be able to do that. It’s never done that before.”

Aziraphale took a step towards him, onto the carpet, and then another step. He walked right through the little stream of water, although when he stepped out of it again, it hadn’t got him wet at all. And then he put his arms around Crowley and held on to him, and Crowley, swallowing, put his arms around Aziraphale too. Not a loose, casual draping of limbs, but hard and tight. Coiling and not letting go. After a moment, he dropped his head to Aziraphale’s shoulder, and breathed in the long-familiar scent of him.

“Do you think,” said Aziraphale, his voice sending warm vibrations through the top of Crowley’s head, “that we could start all over again? Get things right this time. A clean slate.”

“No,” said Crowley, muffled, and then pulled his head upwards. Aziraphale had his mouth half-open, frowning, worried, but Crowley said, “I wouldn’t want to start again. I wouldn’t change it.”

“No,” said Aziraphale, softly. “I suppose not. Me neither.”

“We can only go onwards, angel,” Crowley said, and smiled. “Brave new world.”

“That has such people in it,” answered Aziraphale, gazing at him, before he took Crowley’s face in his hands and kissed him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The conversation in the bar in Berlin runs as follows:
> 
> _\- Hey, someone’s looking at you.  
>  \- English. Oh, like you.  
> \- I’m not English.  
> \- Then why are you so uptight?  
> \- You’re in luck. Look at his clothes. He has money. ___
> 
> If you liked this story, you can also reblog it[on tumblr](https://justlikeeddie.tumblr.com/post/190540447107/your-mirror-equestrianstatue-good-omens-tv)!


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